Quotes About Imagination

Saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.

Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, "the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.")

Visualization works best when you feel totally relaxed. Only when you have a calm state of mind can you get clear, vivid images. Do your visualization in the quiet of your home or car before leaving for the party, the convention, or the big-deal meeting. See it all in your mind's eye ahead of time.

All my life I had been living. How to imagine any other state?

An American will tinker with anything he can put his hands on. But how rarely can he be persuaded to tinker with an abstract idea.

People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?" [Interview in The Independent , 15 October 2005]

I think I'll paint roads on my front room walls to convince myself that I'm going places

An apocryphal story — the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" — tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.

There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.

Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.

Composer" is a word which here means "a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play." This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers. You can invent things like steam-powered window washers. But you can't invent more time.

An apocryphal story - the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" - tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.

You're just jealous of me because I'm a tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian!

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyages, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.

there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

I thought maybe if I stared hard enough, I could see the lights of the city I had left so very far behind. This was nonsense, of course, but there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.

no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.

But your imaginings would be ersatz, as all imaginings are.

Some of the simplest things in like are the most difficult to imagine.