Quotes About Imagination

I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks.

It was unsettling to imagine it alone on the bench without a film, unable to record its own passage into the hands of a stranger.

We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality (p.43)

I raided libraries and church bazaars for art books. It was possible then to find beautiful volumes for next to nothing and I happily dwelt in the world of Modigliani, Dubuffet, Picasso, Fra Angelico, and Albert Ryder.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

The brilliant trees burned through the heavy mist and he climbed them to pluck leaves of gold, cramming fistfuls inside his sweater, imagining the wealth that would be his.

The café I'll never realize, the cafés I'll never know.

Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.

We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new Earth. Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other.

All writers are bums...

Varför måste man skriva? För att ställa sig vid sidan om, som i en kokong, försjunken i ensamhet, på trots mot andras behov. Virginia Woolf hade sitt rum. Proust sina stängda fönsterluckor. Marguerite Duras sitt tysta hus. Dylan Thomas sin enkla bod. Alla var de ute efter en tomhet att fylla med ord. Orden som ska tränga in i orörda marker, uppdaga oinmutade associationer, ge uttryck åt oändligheten.

Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds. The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.

Will you take a picture? she said. I looked down at the bleak panorama and shook my head. How could I take a picture of nothing?

Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

In the green of the hills, he saw red.' p.13

I finally placed where the images in my morning dream might have come from - the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War. Thousands of young soldiers lay dead on the battleground in a peach orchard in full bloom. It was said that the blossoms fell upon them, covering them like a thin layer of fragrant snow. I wondered why I had dreamed that, but then again, why do we dream about anything?

It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Ve o an dü? gören herkesin kendi devirlerindekileri dü?ledi?ini geçirmi?tim akl?mdan. Antik Yunan uygarl??? kendi tanr?lar?n?n dü?lerini kurdu. Emily Brontë çorak arazilerin.

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.

I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box.

In times of strife, we have our imagination, we have our creative impulse, which are things that are more important than material things. They are the things that we should magnify.