Quotes About Imagination

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

She read everything.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality

Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].

a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Tell me, he wanted to say, everything in the whole world - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.

But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.