Quotes About Imagination

tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.

The words that passed between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening to them when they spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly colored picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

But, just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of the people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same time the sole preoccupation of others.

That is rather Pelléas, too," I suggested to Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin. "You know the scene I mean." "Of course I do" was what she said; but "I haven't the faintest idea" was the message proclaimed by her voice and features, which did not mould themselves to the shape of any recollection, and by her smile, which floated in the air, without support.

In such a case we feel more compassionate towards those unknown to us, whom we can only imagine, than towards those whose vulgar daily life is lived close to us, unless we feel completely one of them, one flesh with them; patriotism works this miracle, we stand by our country as we do by ourselves in a love quarrel.

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

Ces fleurs sont d'un rose vraiment céleste, dit Legrandin, je veux dire couleur de ciel rose. Car il y a un rose ciel comme il y a un bleu ciel.

but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our church,

That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face which since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, 'That was her!

Pieni kopaus ikkunaruutuun kuin jokin olisi töytäissyt siihen, sitten väljä kevyt varina kuin ikkunasta kerrosta ylempää olisi heitetty hiekkajyviä, sittern varina laajeni, muuttui säännölliseksi, omaksui rytmin, tuli juoksevaksi, sointuvaksi, musikaaliseksi, määrittämättömäksi, kaiken käsittäväksi: satoi.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent.

Let but a single real feature—the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen from afar or from behind—enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, we imagine that we have seen her before, our heart beats, we hasten in pursuit, and will always remain half-persuaded that it was she, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine's eyes and within her memories.

The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here,

What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the Légende des Siècles, I forget all their names. But in the Feuilles d'Automne, the Chants du Crépuscule, there's a great deal that's the work of a poet, a true poet! Even in the Contemplations,

O modo inquisitivo, ansioso, exigente com que olhamos para a pessoa amada, nossa expectativa da palavra que nos vai dar ou tirar a esperança de um encontro para o dia seguinte, e, até que essa palavra seja dita, a nossa imaginação alternada, se não simultânea, da alegria e do desespero, tudo isso torna a nossa atenção em face do ente querido muito trêmula para que se possa obter uma imagem sua devidamente nítida.

This fleetingness of persons who are not known to us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.

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 a 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.

Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

Ciertos días yo amanecía llena de palabras

Existe un antiguo mito que sostiene que contar historias puede curar enfermedades o salvar; sin historias, viviríamos un presente viejo. Dame la mano, Camila, ven conmigo y te contaré alguna.

Everybody is convinced they have seen something others have not seen, and they delude themselves that they have thought things that other have it thought, but this is just because someone has taken the trouble to tell an ordinary story in an extraordinary way.