Quotes About Imagination

The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

Mi empresa no es difícil, esencialmente. Me bastaría ser inmortal para llevarla a cabo. Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote

Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible.

Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.

Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; but in my case I am unable to imagine a world without books.

medité en ese laberinto perdido: lo imaginé inviolado y perfecto en la cumbre secreta de una montaña, lo imaginé borrado por arrozales o debajo del agua, lo imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos... Pensé en un laberinto de laberintos, en un sinuoso laberinto creciente que abarca el pasado y el porvenir y que implicara de algún modo a los astros.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.

In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in Olalla when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. - The Total Library

I, that used to figure Paradise In the guise of a library

In the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke.

Scattered through the ordinary world, there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.

En el sueño del hombre que soñaba, el soñado se despertó.

Ah,' said the journalist, 'so the entire thing is your own invention. I thought it was true because you gave the name of the street.' I did not dare tell him that the naming of streets is not much of a feat.

A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y como el aire.

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …