Quotes About Imagination

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear.

This melancholy London — I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.

I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread and when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out I dropped the berry in a stream, and caught a little silver trout.... (Song of Wandering Aengus)

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me ("The Circus Animal's Desertion")

Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Come away, O, human child! To the woods and waters wild, With a fairy hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination

The last stroke of midnight dies. All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.

He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.

You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.

All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.

the Byzantine style, which so few care for to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity.

Fellow-wanderer, Could we but mix ourselves into a dream, Not in its image on the mirror!

Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.

He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of

I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon The golden apples of the sun.

and I heard a thing coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it through the universe like a flash of fire. There

An old man plays the bagpipes In a gold and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd.

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

What can be explained is not poetry.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.