Quotes About Imagination

Many artists live with the shadow version of themselves. Unawareness of how things might have been if they have done this and not that. If life had made this choice for them rather than that. The road not taken remains at the back of the mind. For some their shadow exists as an external presence, for others an inner haunting.

You don't paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.

When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

Finally she said, When I grow up, I'm going to live out here. I'll probably be a Miss Somebody, too... Don't grow up, I told her. It only gets more confusing.

Not everyone believes that I'm a fairy princess, but the sparkle I feel inside tells me that it's true.

Oh, God. She'd now have to invent a bawdy verse on the spot. She'd never had to improvise so much in her entire life as she had in the last five minutes. Improvise being another word for lie, of course.

Her mind was obsessively playing and replaying his words of five minutes ago. And finally she could contain them no longer. 'Was she pretty?' she mimicked the vicar's creaky tones. 'Very,' she answered, in a very good imitation of the viscount's own baritone. Kit snorted a laugh. But really, Kit had waxed almost lyrical about Caroline Allston--- Caro, no doubt. Susannah wondered of Caro was carved on the viscount's heart the way it was on the oak, scarred and thick with age.

The duke was sitting silently in the corner, long legs casually outstretched, arms loosely crossed over him, surveying the room with ironic eyes. They lingered on her; he gave her the faintest of smiles. It was almost impossible to believe that this was the man who had said to her 'I want you naked beneath me.' Apart from the rush of blood to various places in her body when she thought it, she could almost imagine it hadn't happened at all.

If he'd been able to imagine it, perhaps he could have saved himself from what was to come. A grief that would reshape his life the way a tsunami reshaped a coastline.

She'd removed her gloves to sketch, and what a soft little paw she had; he was tempted to linger over it for a moment, as he would any small pleasure, and allow his imagination to complete for him how soft the rest of her would be.

I'm wearing clothes in my thoughts and dreams though. What am I wearing in yours? she asked. Me. Conversation between Mary Rose and Harrison in Julie Garwood's FOR THE ROSES

Dreams are for little girls to whisper to each other. They don't really come true. I'm a fully grown woman now, Frances Catherine. I don't imagine impossible things.

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

His father had promised to show him the world. They'd go to Egypt, he'd said, and climb the Pyramids. They'd go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They'd see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they'd glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola. The moon above, he sang, is yours and mine...

reading was how I got my ya-yas out.

Boredom is why God invented books.

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

And as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.

A wonder tale can be truer than true, I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

Each of us wore our memories of what might have been.

Tales within tales. Dreams within dreams. Pattern on pattern and path beyond path. For such short-lived folks, the human kind seem determined to make things as complicated as possible for themselves.