Quotes About Imagination

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.

Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole, by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed love. But anything will feed hate.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong. Books are the most important the most powerful the most beautiful thing humans have ever created.

It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.

Kneeling on St. Mary's stone floor she had envisioned the candles and the cold, but not Lady Imeyne, waiting for Roche to make a mistake in the mass, not Eliwys or Gawyn or Rosemund. Not Father Roche, with his cutthroat's face and worn-out hose. She could never in a hundred years, in seven hundred and thirty-four years, have imagined Agnes, with her puppy and her naughty tantrums, and her infected knee. I'm glad I came, she thought. In spite of everything.

She watched him a while longer and then shut her eyes again. And even though she knew her hand was tucked beneath her cheek and he was on the far side of the room, the instant she closed her eyes he was there beside her again, his hands crossed on his chest and her hand held tightly under them, pressed safely against his heart. Who

Are you making something up in your head, miss?" —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener

Vivimos como soñamos, solos.

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

When you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.