Quotes About Imagination

there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.

Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

You have some fine qualities, but imagination was never one of them.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it.

Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal

All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world.

A four-year-old says, "My mommy lives in heaven. Her eyelashes go down instead of up because she is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in heaven, but I miss her." She feels consoled that her mother "is with God," who, she says, "has pink whiskers, red hair, and two feet.… I did not want her to die until I died. I think I am going to die too in a little while.

All the best paintings made you see various levels of reality at once. They sent you inward as well as outward.

A childhood never fully dies. Stories of life come up through cracks in the accounts, the spaces between death sentences, the pauses in obituaries, finding light and air to grow.

All Thinking is Wishful.

Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.

I'm forever writing around a void—I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is.

Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be .

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

She] always knew he was a fiction but believed in him anyway.

I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.