Quotes About Imagination

All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it.

Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

What a great difference there is,' she said, 'between dreaming of something and dealing with it!

Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.

a forehead so high that it can make you think of cathedrals.

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

SOMEONE ONCE SAID TO ME that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful re-creation of their experience.

if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.

Painters have often taught writers how to see.

we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone's imagination to create a community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by.

Holston asked a class of nine-year-old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of "home." Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof.

Our writers have always pointed the way for us, Mr. Grey, they've formed our thinking and feeling, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Bunin …" He added with pride, "Writers with us are pathfinders.

It is sometimes wise to be abstract.

The point of business was to make just enough money to keep going, not to create a monster of productivity that chained a person to the wheels of power and stifled all creativity and imagination. Business should not be profit-driven; it should be idea-driven.

There's a world we can't see. It exists separately and concurrently with the real world. You enter this world by the offering of prayer and incantation. You live in this world wholly within your mind. You dispel the real world through mental discipline. You rebuff the real world through your enforced mental will. Your interior world will give you what you want and what you need to survive.

Memory is a mirage that fools the heart . . .