Quotes About Imagination

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real.

I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimulates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

I had never thought of school as fun before, but then, I'd never before had a hummingbird, a witch, or a maybe-immortal for teachers.

It's the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.

But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become prisoner of the effect I had on them. [...] I was shackled not so much to my good looks, as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be.

What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

we all have at least one book hiding in the body

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

A shame really, because putting the right book in the right kid's hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers.

poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?

How rarely boyhood loves to paint in glowing tints his future bright, a picture where no line is faint--whose very clouds are touch'd with light. And girlhood hails a world unknown and reads it in her own glad dreams, as lilies see themselves alone reflected in their azure streams. But rosy clouds that morning brings, ere noon may deepen into thunder--and life's dark stream has sterner things than silver lilies growing under.

Blair liked to think of herself as a hopeless romantic in the style of old movie actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. She was always coming up with plot devices for the movie she was starring in at the moment, the movie that was her life.

Architecture should have little to do with problem solving - rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible.

There is no more pressure on my rudder, he once remarked. Plain sailing, no drag on other people either. A bit of dancing now and then, that's fine. I still see those girls, but I pretend they're paintings. Or advertisements. But that was only later.

Sometime on the far side of never.

Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.

In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art.

Let's pretend," he says, "that you never met me. That she was never born. That none of this ever happened." Then he is gone.

For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the effable effable, how they could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility. After she left, he had stopped believing all those fantasies. Wispy, false dreams that disintegrated in the morning's light. Now it occurs to him that, perhaps, there might be truth in them after all.

rainbow of different, beautiful lies. But now, seeing the picture

For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints – with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent – but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires.

With one finger he tips it from the shelf. The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale. He's never seen this particular book before, but as soon as he sees the cover he knows it's the same story. A Japanese folktale