Quotes About Imagination

I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.

To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness. Sina's

Go out among them and tell them that their nostalgia for places they have never been is sex

Yes, did you hear what that woman said? . . . I think it's the artist is the only person who is really given the capability of being happy, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. Don't you think so? Don't you think so? . . .

I can't imagine cutting my wrists in Pokheepsie

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don't know me. You don't even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that's the way you think they are.

Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.

Fables from before the Anaheiming.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game.

Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon? What? Half-imaginary.

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

The dream recedes, but leaves a residue.

Google 'tulpa,'" Eunice said, "you get Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who've invented themselves an imaginary playmate." "I did." "Don't feel particularly Tibetan, myself," Eunice said. "Maybe invented, but how would I know?

I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,' she said. 'Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home.

and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. .

I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.