Quotes About Imagination

La fantasia è un posto dove ci piove dentro.

As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues...And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman...

childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.

Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.

Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon.

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.

The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.

With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.

KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden. POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence.

Si una noche de invierno un viajero, fuera del poblado de Malbork, asomándose desde la abrupta costa sin temor al viento y al vértigo, mira hacia abajo donde la sombra se adensa en una red de líneas que se entrelazan, en una red de líneas que se intersecan sobre la alfombra de hojas iluminadas por la luna en torno a una fosa vacía, «¿Cuál historia espera su fin allá abajo?», pregunta, ansioso de escuchar el relato.

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.

nh?ng có lúc ngòi bút ch? rào r?o b?i m?c, không l?n ch?y b?ng m?t gi?t ??i, và cu?c ??i thì toàn b? ?n goài kia, bên ngoài ô c?a s?, bên ngoài b?n, và b?n c?m th?y mình s? không bao gi? còn có th? n??ng náu n?i trang gi?y b?n ?ang vi?t

Escape, is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.

Nella forma che il caso e il vento dànno alle nuvole l'uomo è già intento a riconoscere figure.

Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book.

Fantasy is a place where it rains.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face

The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.