Quotes About Imagination

What had he hoped for back then? What kind of future had he dreamed of when he'd stared up at the lightning-fork crack in the ceiling?

Only in the campfire-stoked stories of Boy Scouts, bedtime tales baby-sitters employ to frighten bratty charges, or in the sweet delight of grandpas who never grew up, would the stories live on.

For whatever the era, nationality, gender and genre; whether realistic, traditional, fabulist, historical, fantasist, minimalist, crossover, the writer worthy of the literary arts and a host of readers always offers the riches of stories, that we may be less deprived and disconsolate, and more human and humane; perhaps wiser, and kinder to ourselves and our brothers and other strangers.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. —THEODORE VON KÁRMÁN

the movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.

There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitiveand getting away with itis far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they're both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

I remember the cloud on its blue bicycle gliding over the leaves under the bare branches. You and I were walking. You wore your long green dress with the hem frayed so the loose threads seemed like tiny roots. We were holding hands when my hand became a yellow scarf and you stood waving it slowly. from "Daffodil Poem

because you've chosen poetry, you're condemned to wonder at skills and felicities of language or imagination in the poems of others that you yourself may never achieve, no matter how hard you work toward them—things that will always be beyond your reach but also will always be luring you on.

I entered the empty room. I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day. One day I held a picture against the bare wall: it was a window. Climbing through, I stood in a sloping field at dusk. As I began walking, night settled. Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights of the village, and always at my back, I felt the white room swallowing what was passed. from "The Room," Selected and New Poems. (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language.

I'm actually after another notion here—what I've called Quest. Quest has to do with the intersection of your own personal life and the art of poetry in your time and place. It has to do with what you want to do with poetry and what poetry wants to do with you. It has to do with coming to understand who you are and who you hope to be when you are reborn through language and imagination as a poet.

Nowhere does Niemeyer set out a specific aesthetic. In "The Autonomous Man" he notes that the imagination can be used for good or ill. In the broadest sense, he believed that the imagination could move either in the direction of autonomy, creating self-enclosed systems, or in the direction of participation, that is, a deepening of our sense of the mystery that surrounds our existence.

Bad art, for Niemeyer, was not just that which promotes immorality, but, in an even deeper sense, promotes unreality—the fantasy that leaves us locked in private purgatories.

I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.

One man's daydreaming is another man's novel.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he'd make a fortune.

Boogey boogey boogey

My plans are still in embryo, a town on the edge of wishful thinking.

If you are one of those lucky persons who own a pen that writes underwater, you might try living in a swimming pool.