Quotes About Imagination

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. 'Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designes...We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

wonderful to relate)

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again

So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no.

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.

In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation.

Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish." (161)

By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought.

And muse on nature with a poet's eye.

Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside.

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.