Quotes About Imagination

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem. (...) She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem.

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.

Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule. I

Lisa does not think about possible outcomes because a a world in whcih Claudia is not cannot be imagined. Claudia simply is, ever has been and always will be.

But the point was to be carefree, independent. Artists can't be hampered by the dailiness of ordinary life--Tony felt strongly about that. Doing the same things every day, forever bothered about money. Art has to be freed from all that.

Reading in old age for me is doing what it has always done--it frees me from the closet of my own mind.

What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time-capsule.

Lowry and Augustus John)

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

You already have the capacity to travel through time. Simply wait for the future to arrive.

is reality simply a dream we share?

Emily did not want to believe in ghosts. But she kept seeing them. She had been seeing them ever since she could remember.

So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world, interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.

None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.

And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.

But didn't you know? Everything is made up.

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.