Quotes About Imagination

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

The poet thinks with his poem...

According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are dissassociated from natural objects and specified meanings but when they are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination.

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter– Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

And a church spire sketched on the sky, of sheet metal and open beams, to resemble a church spire

Filth and vermin though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness.

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.

prose has to do with the fact of an emotion ; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination. prose : statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts - technical expositions, jargon of all sorts - fictional and other - poetry : new form dealt with as a reality in itself.

perhaps it is all art and Barnum our one genius (in the arts) on the moral plane

a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates

Poets are dammed but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination.

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences freshly and with the appearance of reality – This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –

First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know : the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose. The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience – (said that half a dozen times already).

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

Never was his remarkable memory more useful than when he could see mathematics only in his mind's eye.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.