Quotes About Imagination

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

Anything that might occur in 'story-time' could ultimately not be stranger than the utter oddity of the 'real-world.

When we read a book, though, we call it ours, don't we, and I have always said that's because readers make a book their own through reading it. They do half the work, with their own imaginations, fleshing things out, painting each character and place and event in more detail than we have actually set out on paper, and we writers merely set the readers on their way.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

from ages seven through thirteen I felt a kind of age-loyalty to characters [ Out of the Garden ].

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Popular art is the dream of society it does not examine itself.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own. And thus, believing, or, at least, hoping, that no Creature can, or will, Envy me for this World of mine, I remain, Noble Ladies, Your Humble Servant, M. Newcastle.

If any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.

she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men's flowers. 'These are other men's flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.

there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

Reading fiction—excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers—has been shown to enhance theory of mind:

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

possible if we spoke to those we most fear. I hope we can reclaim conversation as our route back to each other, and as the path forward to a hopeful future. It only requires imagination and courage and faith. These are qualities possessed by everyone. Now is the time to exercise them to their fullest.

There are no descriptions, it is almost needless to say, of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis playing with kittens.

Few pleasures are as basic and satisfying as hearing a good story-unless it's the pleasure of writing one.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.