Quotes About Imagination

We are fictioneers.

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness.

If wishes were filet mignon, we'd always eat well at dinner

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure you've got a fabulously dark, twisted, and perhaps even deeply sick imagination. I'm not trying to devalue the dementedness of your imagination and do not mean to diminish your pride in it.

My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations.

Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg.

Winny had learned from books... you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac - he could be anything, and he wouldn't know until he was tested. One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn't real like the FedEx guy.

Winny didn't know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn't smoke and never would.

In life, little happens by chance, and most bad hands we're dealt are the consequence of our actions, which are shaped by our wisdom and our ignorance. In my experience, survival depends on hoping for the best while recognizing that disaster is more likely and that it can't be averted if it can't be imagined.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?

Art is the only answer to chaos and the void.

although we universally celebrate imagination, it is in fact a power that can uplift us and save us --- or as easily demean and destroy us. Mozart imagined great music. Hitler imagined death camps and built them.

There are other worlds to sing in.

Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine.

Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is.

The next one's also from Thoreau. 'If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.