Quotes About Imagination

The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

and he, Hugh Person....began to undress her in the motels of his mind

He started as a maker of Cartesian devils—imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He

He never saw that dress again and when he mentioned it in retrospective evocation she invariably retorted that he must have dreamt it

for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate

Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses

Vladimir Nabokov

Il genio è un africano che vede in sogno la neve.

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Oh, 'impressed' is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery.

Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek.

You are an artist,' I said -- to say something.

Now the colored pencils in more detail.

We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skipspace piece), standing on a marginal file, feels in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play.

I noticed, for instance, that dreams under the midnight sun tended to be highly coloured, and this my friend the photographer confirmed.

Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again.

We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

A wonderful point in favor of some kind of hereafter is this: When the mind rejects as childishly absurd a paradise with musical angels or abstract colonnades with Horace and Milton in togas conversing and walking together through the eternal twilight, or the protracted voluptas of the orient or any other eternity -- such as the one with devils and porcupines -- we forget that if we could have imagined life before living it would have seemed more improbable than all our hereafters

What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back...Any true scientist (not, of course,the fraudulent mediocrity, whose only treasure is the ignorance he hides like a bone) should be capable of experiencing that sensuous pleasure of direct and divine knowledge. He may be twenty and he may be eighty-five but without that tingle there is no science.

Vladimir Nabokov

Yatmadan önce okuyabileceÄŸiniz iyi bir kitaba sahip olduÄŸunuzu bilmek zevklerin en büyüÄŸüdür.

Time moves ahead of our fancies