Quotes About Imagination

The philanthropists and humanitarians have their minds all full of the wretched and miserable whose case appeals to compassion, attacks the sympathies, takes possession of the imagination, and excites the emotions. They

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.

until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum -- a room in a dream.

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

A book is like a deck of windows

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies.

The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn't to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers "a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language." A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author's agile mind.

Nipples may be said to resemble the ripest of raspberries or perhaps even a thimble, but "why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident," though Gass himself is willing to do it and make it look effortless. Maybe they really look like "the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers," and for someone who spends his days at his desk that image can prove surprisingly effective.

But then my wife is subject to failures of the imagination. I have tried to carry her but her sentiments are too readily aroused. Her eyes stay at the skin. Only her heart, only her tenderest feelings, go in. I, on the other hand, cut surgically by all outward growths, all manifestations, merely, of disease and reach the ill within.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

It took a long time to get past the wall my demand for objective reality erected, but eventually I learned how to surrender my quest for reality and simply enjoy the experience for itself. And, slowly, I began to realize that "reality" was quite different, and a whole lot weirder, than I'd ever imagined possible.

I'm sure I have a process, but it mostly takes place in my dreams.

the spectacle of people following current custom for lack of will or imagination to do anything else is hardly a new failing.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

Half the business of modern education is taken up in learning not to be ignorant; a process peculiarly unfavorable both to strength of mind and pregnancy of imagination...

The world has been doing little else but playing at make-believe all its lifetime.