Quotes About Imagination

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.

As únicas doenças que os "curandeiros" curam são as que seus clientes imaginativos não têm.

Maybe the fact that nobody believes in magic and wood sprites and happiness is the problem of the day. [Ludi]

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient to living. It's a way of looking at life through a distorted telescope, and that's what makes you laugh at the terrible realities. Whimsy, which is a deliberate contradiction of reality, is pure escapism. And without whimsy, none of us can live." Fantasy and whimsy are not merely necessary for life; they are Dr. Seuss's stock-in-trade. But there are limits to their reach.

We don't have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs. We do, however, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses.

When I was a boy I once received, as a Christmas gift, a beautiful book of oriental fairy tales. The stories all took place in India. They told of mighty kings riding to war on elephants; of marble palaces with golden domes where lovely princesses were imprisoned; of magic music that came at midnight from an enchanted grove in the jungle.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

Love's language is hyperbole, but whispered, sibilant similes and promises sotto voce. It's easy to imagine you've misheard

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.

Cowper invented the idea of the 'armchair traveller': 'My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.'90

The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

Horror writers are specialists in the worst-case scenario.

There are really no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

Oh there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.

I had slept nothing all night, making ghosts for myself, filling my mind with them and giving myself pale frights. All the ghosts had a different punishment for me, some of them shocking indeed.

So all I could have of Cienwen was in my mind, and I kept her there as men keep libraries of rare books, seldom to be touched but happy to know you have got.

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they'd been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors")