Quotes About Imagination

How long this lasted I can't imagine, it wasn't an imaginary time, it also didn't belong to the time  of things that happen.

Youth fills the time to come with imagination; old age relives the past through memory. The two things are equivalent.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.

Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

The specular thing-image, or thing-'mental image' chiasm: imagination inherent to each subfield of this sense. The imaginary deploys itself in this field—which is therefore carnal. The imaginary: decentering of the sensible. The concept: decentering of the imaginary. Me-world Chiasm: the things gaze upon me. I gaze upon myself (through the eyes of the things). The chiasm is the idea of Being as the elevation of the relative to the Absolute by means of the diaphragm and the 'there is.

One cannot even say that one believes in the perception of the real. Belief only intervenes after a preexisting doubt, and thus it is the imaginary that we truly believe in, because our beliefs lack some support. I do not believe in this chair I see: the chair is simply there, that is all. Perception does not await proof in order to grasp an object; it is prior to careful observation. In this sense, perception, like the imagination, precedes all premises.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.

One reason why the painter takes up his brush is that in one sense the art of painting still remains to be created...Painting is always something to be created.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

As a kid, all I thought about was death.

There are certain pieces of music that are always attached to certain books.

Let the wild rumpus start!

And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!

There should be a place where only the things you want to happen, happen

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.