Quotes About Imagination

With Gorey, never getting there is half the fun.

Don't go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.

Who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be—well, more? All

The life of the poem might be extended in ways you cannot know, and continue in a world so far from yours as to be nearly unimaginable. The circle that is the outer edge of your life extends, and goes on extending.

It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

They create our expectations. Keep in mind that an expectation is a belief projected into some future moment. Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.

Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.

but writing as "Lewis Carroll," had Alice go through the looking

extremely difficult for the average person to visualize a space of more than three dimensions, since that is the only spatial geometry with which we have had any personal experience.

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough.

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people.

Browning calls the poet God's spy and that's a complimentary way of putting it. We could say, more neutrally, that writers are almost always spies and have the kinds of lives that spying creates. They are constantly collecting information, making mental notes.

It was a slap-splash, a fleshy belly-flop sound, like the fin of something large in these waters, surfacing briefly to wave at the stars.

Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

In spite of what many teachers of 'creative thinking' say, the best way to be creative is not to try to think without limits but to very carefully define what those limits should be.

Look, dudes, we didn't come this far down the rabbit hole to stop on the one-yard line in the middle of like Nazi headquarters," said Nick. "Did we?" "No, but if you tried, you could probably mix a few more metaphors," said Elise.

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

If this is a dream, I'm begging you, don't ever let them wake me.

The only difference between realizing a dream and losing oneself in fantasy [is] backbreaking work.

As I look at the world today, I am aware of how minuscule one person may seem to the systemic actions in front of our eyes yet, oddly, I ask you to laugh at such shrinking of our potential. For the Divine does not make mistakes and nearly every sacred tradition says we who exist were imagined since the beginning of time.

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst. —MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIAL, ROMAN POET

If you can't find an actual partner or monitor, try conjuring the image of a loving parent, grandparent, friend or teacher—someone you would not want to disappoint, and whom you can imagine saying, "Good work, you're doing great!" when you finally do what you've been avoiding. Even if only imagined, the support of another person can be the key to getting done what you would otherwise put off.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.