Quotes About Imagination

Dear, dear," Ivan said, eyebrow raised. "So this is what Kansas looks like.

and Edmond blew smoke rings in the air and I closed my eyes and wished they were mine.

Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

I might have things to look forward to again, things I can't even imagine yet.

It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

You got caught up in some fantasy, and now you can't see anything at all.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.

Male novelists made up words in their fiction: "phallomaterialism"; "ero-tectonics.

Sometimes an alternative world is much better than the real one.

Plus, constantly worrying about money is *boring*. Use your brain...to be creative.

I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world.

Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood.

The world is a fiction the brain constructs

This was their favorite place to meet. It always felt hidden, forgotten. The gold-lettered World Book encyclopedias from the 1980s. The smell of old glue and crumbling paper, the industrial carpet burning her palms. It reminded her of what you did when you were a little girl, making little burrows and hideaways. Like boys did with forts. Eli and his friend, stacking sofa cushions, pretending to be sharpshooters. With girls, you didn't call them forts, though it was the same.

We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.

The world is a fiction the brain constructs. The smell of a fresh peach, the punch of a firefly in the night sky. The lilting hush-hush of a first lullaby. The brain fashions it all and we don't know how or why.

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn't there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

It wasn't just her words, it was her way of putting them together, the voice that seemed to gain power with each one, so that my head had been filled with images so magically vibrant it was as if I had seen them with my own eyes. She changed the world into something fine. She made one believe.