Quotes About Imagination

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say....

Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn't seen a million times before.

When Will had conceived this fantasy and joined SPAT [Single Parents - Alone Together] he had imagined sweet little children, not children who would be able to track him down and come to his house.

I libri, ammettiamolo, sono meglio di qualunque altra cosa. Se organizzassimo un campionato di fantaboxe culturale, schierando sul ring i libri contro il meglio che qualunque altra forma d'arte abbia da offrire, sulla distanza di quindici riprese…be', i libri vincerebbero praticamente sempre.

Books are, let's face it better then everything else

La coerenza è l'estremo rifugio degli uomini privi di fantasia, sono intervenuto io. Ancora Wilde, non sapevo resistere.

Learning to read happens once and once only for most of us, and for the vast majority of adults in first-world countries it happened a long time ago. You have to dig deep, deep down into the bog of the almost lost, and then carry what you have found carefully to the surface, and then you have to find the words and images to describe what you see on your spade.

Peter Medawar described a hypothesis as an imaginative leap into the unknown. Once the leap is taken, a hypothesis becomes an attempt to tell a story that is understandable in human terms.

Every person I have a conversation with now runs a chance of being fictionalized.

good examples of platform-aware work in Alexander Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Steven E. Jones's The Meaning of Video Games, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

the evil Swarm, and the backstabbing Dolmasi, and the enigmatic Skiohra, and even the other two known alien races that humanity had never met, the Findiri and Quiassi, and Danny would make up names for the alien ships and descriptions of what the aliens looked like and how their ships— Dammit, stop daydreaming

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

Except for when I was very little and thought that being an engineer meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars trailing behind. One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.

After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity.

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.

Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, ho many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.

I remember the first time I realized I could make myself see something that wasn't there. I was ten years old, walking home from school. Some boys from my class ran by shouting and laughing. I wanted to be like them. And yet. I didn't know how. I'd always felt different from the others, and the difference hurt. And then I turned the corner and saw it. A huge elephant, standing alone in the square. I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe. So I tried. And I found I could.