Quotes About Imagination

These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and department chair in a fake nose and glasses, brandishing a live, terrified goose... (Richard Russo, Straight Man)

they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition.

It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully

He'd imagined the world would be a better place when it was rid of Big Jim Sullivan, but it had remained pretty much the same place, with just one less person to blame things on.

most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

heard his cry but it was like an imagined sound, for it was mingled with the pulse of his life, and it seemed the rain was red blood gushing upon me from the sky, covering my body and mixing with the mud beneath us and around us until we were drowning in a great, thick lake of blood. My mind was empty except for that one thought of red rain steadily falling and then, finally, even that thought grew dim and there was stillness all around me. I

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.

the tricksterlike unpredictable spontaneity of the divine

We're not copying life, we're making a comment on it.

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the maturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

Sweep away the clouds And let a dome of blue sky Give this sea a name!

In a movie he could dream without effort; all he had to do was lean back in a seat and keep his eyes open.

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.

The Outlaws loved cellars. … There was a door under the stairs. They opened it. There were steps. Yes, most certainly cellars. Very cautiously the little procession crept down. Glorious cellars, enormous cellars, heavenly vistas of cellars opening out of each other. They explored blissfully for some time for sheer love of exploration.