Quotes About Imagination

What we use to construct the past is...a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses...a construct of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

Sam Winter Moon had cautioned him long ago that it was best to believe in all possibilities, that there were more mysteries in the world than a man could ever hope to understand.

It seems to me that when you look back at a life - yours or another's - what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer in New Bremen is a construct of both what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

That is one thing love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear's worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.

Meloux had never seen his own son. Never carried him on his shoulders or held him when he cried. Never felt the small boy's breath, warm and sweet smelling, break against his face. Never knew the pleasures of being for his son the slayer of monsters imagined in the night.

Whatever you think you're not capable of doing, the minute you think it, the moment it enters your mind, just in the imagining, it's already been done. Only a matter of time before your hands follow through.

Svajon?s išlaisvina.

In every good tale there is a seed of truth, and from that seed a lovely story grows. Some of what I've told you is true and some . . . well, let's just call it the bloom on the rosebush.

But I believe if you tell a story, it's like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.

Far better, I believe, to be like children and open ourselves to every beautiful possibility, for there is nothing our hearts can imagine that is not so.

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.

Writing is magic for those willing to follow their imagination to a region where anything is possible.

I love books. They connect you with the past and the present, with original minds and noble spirits, with what living has been and meant to others. They instruct, inspire, shake you up, make you laugh and weep, think and dream. But while they do enhance experience, they are not a substitute for it.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

You can cheat with a picture. You can fall in love with an image of someone, with a memory or an idea of her. For that matter, the matter is generally easier to love than the actual person, since the image will never change, never grow old, never argue or disappoint you.

Oh phosphorescence. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.

But in a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They wrote for you. They "laid themselves out," they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphonyhinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.

Take thy plastic spade, It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants, They are thy colours.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

If this is a dream the whole world is inside it.