Quotes About Imagination

I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in interpreting coincidence exactly the way you want

The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.

As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur, and that the blue spring mist that make an ugly street look beautiful is just as real a thing as the street itself.

this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.

Again the thunder clapped. Still Eva stood in the field. Maybe, she thought, a girl struck by lightning would split down the middle and become two girls, and then she'd have a friend. She held out her watch with its metal band, to call the lightning down.

In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. -Lady Georgina Maitland-

Have you looked at my books? Glanced at my titles? Fondled my spines?

Come, Titania, your walnut-shell carriage awaits, drawn by dragonflies and coached by a tiny black beetle. Away will we to dance like dandelion fluff upon the wind!

Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.

Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.' 'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?' 'Yes.' 'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?

Marriages are like certain books, a story where you turn the last page and you think it's over and then there's an epilogue, and after that you're inclined to go on wondering about the characters or imagining that their lives continue without you, dear reader. Until you forget most of that book, you're stuck puzzling over what happened to them after you closed it.

I don't think painters have the answers about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work.

you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

There is a final resource to which I've resorted when necessary—the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.

At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.

I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.

Tan diferente parece la ladera de una colina turca de la pendiente de un prado magiar? Claro que no, pero la diferencia es imposible de borrar del ojo cuando la historia te informa desde la mente.

It was as if she could hear music, where there was no music.

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

Not for the first time, Ofelia wondered if humans had thought of anything really new in the past ten thousand years. Had they only wandered the stars because they were tired of their stale jokes and curses?

This has the potential to be a rolling doughnut