Quotes About Imagination

If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.

A word is also a picture of a word.

How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame.

I'll tell you what surprises me." "Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?" "It's your cat," he said. "I don't have a cat." "That's what surprises me." "You think I'm a cat person." "I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.

Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you.

Catastrophe is our bedtime story.

It's the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.

Vokspapiret ble skilt fra rullen i et rat-a-tat-forløp, krøp langs den hakkete kanten på esken, og hun hørte det nedover ryggraden, tenkte hun.

We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.

As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.

The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.

mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity. How sad and remorseful and guilty all those people are, standing by your great bronze coffin.

Are secrets a tunnel to a dreamworld where you control events?

He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn't see it anymore (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.

Even after you think you've seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined.

dreams (the waste material of premonitions).

How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

How much pleasure did you take as a kid," Lasher said, "in imagining yourself dead?

She looked past the bowl into a space inside her head that was also here in front of her.