Quotes About Imagination

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.

on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived.

Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet.

Me pasé la mañana luchando con la sensación de volutas descarriadas de un mundo intentando filtrarse por las grietas de otro. ¿Conocéis la sensación de empezar un libro nuevo antes de que el recuerdo del último haya tenido tiempo de cerrarse detrás de vosotros? Deja uno el libro anterior con ideas y temas —personajes incluso— atrapados en las fibras de la ropa y cuando abre el libro nuevo siguen ahí.

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.

My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory.

They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

It was like living entirely inside a book.

For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way.

I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.