Quotes About Imagination

Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.

Poverty is not primarily about money. It is about having no idea what to do and/or having no one with whom to do it. The former I called imagination and the latter I called community. To the extent that our neighborhood had imagination and community, we were not poor. But without imagination and community, no money could help us. . . . The role of the local church is to be a community of imagination [for the kingdom].12

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

Will you never grow up?" "I doubt it, and I certainly hope not.

Rousseau's constant influence on later generations is indubitable (though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

Les mots n'ont pas toujours besoin d'une destination. On les laisse s'arrêter aux frontières des sensations. Errant sans tête dans l'espace du trouble. Et c'est bien là le privilège des artistes : vivre dans la confusion.

Readers always find themselves in a book, in one way or another. Reading is a completely egotistical pleasure. Unconsciously we expect books to speak to us. An author can write the most farfetched or implausible story ever, but there will still be readers who will still be readers who will say: 'I don't believe it: you wrote the story of my life!

La vida tiene una dimensión interior, con historias que no se materializan en la realidad, pero que no por ello dejamos de vivir.

Words do not always need a destination. We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings. Running around headless in the vague zone. And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.

A los escritores los hace tan felices la idea de llevar a cabo alguna tarea doméstica! Les gusta compensar sus vagabundeos nebulosos con un frenético interés por lo concreto.

Auf die ein oder andere Weise erkennt sich ein Leser in einem Buch immer selbst wieder. Angeregtes Lesen ist die totale Egomanie. Man ist automatisch auf der Suche nach dem, was einen persönlich anspricht. Ein Autor kann eine völlig groteske und unwahrscheinlich anmutende Geschichte erzählen, es wird immer einen Leser geben, der verkündet: »Unglaublich, Sie haben mein Leben aufgeschrieben!«

Il avait imaginé que le temps et l'éloignement lui permettraient de panser sa douleur.

The relative constancy of the love of family and friends makes the absolute faithfulness of divine love at least conceivable. Hints of unconditional love from humans make the possibility of absolutely unconditional divine love imaginable.

Maurice liked this place. Even if there were no jewels, it was nice to dream about being rich. It was nice to dream about being well again. This was a place that invited dreams.

Michael Swan-wick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, short-shorts inspired by the periodic table of the elements.

You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance.

superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start.

May all your dreams but one come true, for what is life without a dream?

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

Syd always gets in there.

What are other people to us? Material. The stuff of our work. Whom do we love more, the girl or the portrait, the thing we've made of her? We artists, we're not quite human, are we? We love no one.

He tried to draw a woman and it looked like a house. He tried to draw a man and it looked like a really old house. He tried to draw a house and it looked like a fucked-up cow.

But in the years since the neoliberal project really has been stripped down to what was always its essence: not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination, and willing – with it's cumbersome securitization and insane military projects – to destroy the capitalist order itself if that's what it took to make it seem inevitable.