Quotes About Imagination

Last night — it's hard to explain to you — last night I dreamed that I was dreaming. Could it be like that after death? the dream of a dream of a dream of a dream.

I find the greatest serenity in hallucination.

My old life was necessary to me because it was precisely its error that made me take up imagining a hope that, without the life that I led, I wouldn't have known.

To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait , has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read 'absent-minded'.

A veces tengo la impresión de que escribo por simple curiosidad intensa. Es que, al escribir, me doy las sorpresas más inesperadas.

She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.

O pior é que ela poderia riscar tudo o que pensara. Seus pensamentos eram, depois de erguidos, estátuas no jardim e ela passava pelo jardim olhando e seguindo o seu caminho.

When she was a little girl, her aunt, in order to frighten her, insisted that the vampire – the one that sucks human blood by biting its victims in the flesh of the neck – casts no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire, for the blood would add a touch of pink to her sallow complexion. For she gave the impression of having no blood unless a day might come when she would have to spill it.

When she was a little girl, her aunt, in order to frighten her, insisted that the vampire - the ones that sucks human blood by biting its victims in the flesh of the neck - casts no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire, for the blood would add a touch of punk to her sallow complexion. For she gave the impression of having no blood unless a day might come when she would have to spill it.

No quiero tener la terrible limitación de quien vive sólo de lo que puede tener un sentido. Yo no: lo que quiero es una verdad inventada.

I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.

I am going to create what happened to me. Only because living isn't tellable. Living isn't livable. I shall have to create upon life. And without lying. Yes to creation, no to lying. Creation isn't imagination, it's running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality.

It's so odd and hard to substitute the paintbrush for that strangely familiar but always remote thing, the word. The extreme beauty and intimate beauty is within it.

What sustains me is to know that I shall always fabricate a god in the image I require in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will quietly pretend that we are all justified, and that there is nothing to be done. All this because we are astute by nature and the bastions of something. And above all, because we try not to understand.

It's so odd and hard to substitute the paintbrush for that strangely familiar but always remote thing, the word. The extreme and intimate beauty is within it.

It's so odd and hard to substitute the paintbrush now for that strangely familiar but always remote thing, the word. The extreme and intimate beauty is within it.

Of my own death, yes, I was indeed aware, for death was the future and is imaginable, and I had always had time to imagine. But the instant, the very instant - the right now - that is unimaginable, between the right now and the I there is no space: it is just now, inside me.

I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.

Si no puedes librarte de desear pasiones, lee novelas y aventuras, que también para eso existen los escritores.

Mesmo na liberdade, quando escolhia alegre novas veredas, reconhecia-as depois. Ser livre era seguir-se afinal, e eis de novo o caminho já traçado. Ela só veria o que já possuía dentro de si. Perdido pois o gosto de imaginar.

There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she hated nature sometimes.

I know what I am doing here: I'm improvising. But what's wrong with that? improvising as in jazz they improvise music, jazz in fury, improvising in front of the crowd.

In the chapter on the force of gravity, in elementary school, she'd invented a man with a funny disease. The force of gravity didn't work on him...So he'd fall off the earth, and keep falling evermore, because she didn't know how to give him a destiny. Where was he falling? Later she figured it out: he kept falling, falling and got used to it, eventually learning how to eat falling, sleep falling, live falling, until he died. And would he keep falling?

Creating isn't imagination, it's taking the great risk of grasping reality.