Quotes About Imagination

Mon plaisir ne serait plus dans le monde mais dans la littérature.

but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.

The 'action' began: to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and create an atmosphere.

Gerçek bir insan, kendisiyle ne kadar derin bir yak?nl?k kursak da, büyük ölçüde duyular?m?z taraf?ndan alg?lan?r, yani saydam de?ildir... Romanc?n?n bulu?u, ruhun nüfuz edemedi?i bölümlerin yerine e?it miktarda manevi, yani ruhumuzun özümleyebilece?i unsur koymakt?.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

By an inverse gymnastic, I who had made a mental effort to add to Rachel all that Saint-Loup had added to her of himself, I attempted to subtract the support of my heart and mind from the composition of Albertine and to picture her to myself as she must appear to Saint-Loup, as Rachel had appeared to me. Those differences, even though we were to observe them ourselves, what importance would we attach to them

as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

The constant vision of this imaginary happiness helped me to bear the ruining of my real happiness. With a woman who does not love us, as with someone who has died, the knowledge that there is nothing left to hope for does not prevent us from going on waiting.

And while Bloch's eye gleamed as he thought of what the conversation of these marvellous people must have been, I was thinking that I had exaggerated my pleasure in their society, having never got any until I was alone and could differentiate them in my imagination. Did Bloch realise this?

could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion;

But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past

No doubt these geographical regions and the historic past that injected forest glades and Gothic steeples into their names had to a certain extent shaped their faces, their minds, and their prejudices, but had survived in them only as does the cause in the effect—that is, as something that can be unearthed by the intelligence but in no way perceived by the imagination.

In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself.

Não tinha à minha frente mais que um senhor de casaca que se ia afastando; mas eu manobrava em seu redor, como um refletor defeituoso, e sem conseguir aplicá-lo exatamente sobre ele, o pensamento de que era o príncipe de Saxe e ia ver a princesa de Guermantes.

She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him," and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

his imagination and did not feed his jealousy. Swann's mind would become exhausted, until, passing his hand over his eyes, he would exclaim: "We must trust in God," like those who, after having persisted in embracing the problem of the reality of the external world or the immortality of the soul, grant their tired brains the relief of an act of faith.

La vraie vie, [...] c'est la littérature.

je m'en croyais la possession entièrement assurée, que j'avais négligé d'en calculer la valeur, ce qui faisait qu'il me paraissait forcément inférieur à des plaisirs, si petits qu'ils fussent, mais que, cherchant à les imaginer, j'évaluais.

Assim vai mudando o nosso coração, durante a vida, e esta é a pior das dores; porém só a conhecemos através da leitura, pela imaginação: na realidade o coração se trasnforma da mesma maneiracomo se produzem certos fenômenos da natureza, tão vagarosamente que, embora possamos verificar de modo sucessivo seus estados diferentes, em compensação nos foge a própria sensação de mudança.

In actual fact, I had not imagined there to have been anything sensual, or even sentimental, in the Baron's offers. I had said that to my parents out of sheer foolishness. But the future sometimes dwells in us without our knowing it, and the words thought to be untruthful describe an imminent reality.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.

And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray,