Quotes About Imagination

The person who doesn't read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.

This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.

Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.

For the male who dominates and writes, or by writing dominates, the woman has always been portrayed with hostility from the earliest times. Let us not be deceived by angelic descriptions of women. On the contrary, precisely because great literature is dominated by sweet, gentle creatures, the world of satire—which is that of the popular imagination—continually demonizes the woman, from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to modern times.

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

When nature fails, we turn to art.

in a story there is always a reader, and this reader is a fundamental ingredient not only of the process of storytelling but also of the tale itself. Today

It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist.

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it's an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege.

Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.

There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.

O mundo está cheio de livros fantásticos que ninguém lê

there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy, a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History, and, even, with the European tradition.

And you," I said with childish impertinence, "never commit errors?" "Often," he answered. "But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.

Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines—only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented.

World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions...

metaphor is not only a means of delight but also, and above all, a tool of cognition...

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something about the world.

Toda imagen estética está superada por las imágenes posibles que suscita, que abre. Sin embargo, no podría manifestarse ningún desvarío, porque la experiencia tiene lugar sobre y en el objeto.

Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.