Quotes About Imagination

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

The price of imagination is pain.

Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.

Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

There are as many versions of a book as there are readers.

Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,' Thoreau had said. 'Live the life you've imagined.

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.

It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live.

The object of art is to give life a shape

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. "Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath famously asked.

Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality, yes, but not an escape from truth.

I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.

The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfillment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it and repeated it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn't work for them—as was usually the case—they stuck to it anyway. Then they'd alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge; how minds connect. Dreams, empathy, understanding, escape.

She wouldn't poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection.