Quotes About Imagination

The historian will tell you what happened. The Novelist will tell you what it felt like. And the historical fiction writer does both!

Jamie liked perspiration, a little bit of dirt, and complications.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

A good Book, has no Ending...

For surely as each November has its April, mysteries only are significant; and one mystery-of-mysteries creates them all: nothing false and possible is love (who's imagined,therefore limitless) love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if,love is to yes

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

Really unreal world, will you perhaps do the breathing for me while I am away?

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any–lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we're not poets.

Querying greys between mouthed houses curl thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane, the poetic carcass of a girl

if you like my poems let them walk in the evening,a little behind you then people will say "Along this road i saw a princess pass on her way to meet her lover (it was toward nightfall) with tall and ignorant servants. — E.E. Cummings, "if you like my poems let them," Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems of E.E. Cummings . Liveright February 5, 2001) Originally published 1983.

dead says come with me he says(andwhyevernot)into the round well and see the kitten and the penny and the jackknife and the rosebug and you say Sure you say (like that) sure i'll come with you you say for i like kittens i do and jackknives i do and pennies i do and rosebugs i do

here's to one undiscoverable guess of whose mad skill each world of blood is made (whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

lovers like rej and lena smile(while looming darkly a kindness of fragrance opens around them)and whisper their joy under entirely the coming quitenotimaginable silenceofsound

Days of Innocence 1 who are you,little i (five or six years old) peering from some high window;at the gold of november sunset (and feeling:that if day has to become night this is a beautiful way)

Cummings had in mind creations of this sort when he said, 'The day of the spoken lyric is past. The poem which has at last taken its place does not sing itself; it builds itself, three-dimensionally, gradually, subtly, in the consciousness of the experiencer.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables--all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath--how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills...

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.