Quotes About Imagination

And sometimes she would dream again of being Namakaokahai'i, her waves rolling across burled coral beds, scattering moonlight, cresting higher and higher the farther she traveled over the reef. She was a colossus of water and motion soaring toward the black crescent of 'Awahuua Bay, her soul perched on the curling lip of the wave, riding it in the only way she could now; she felt the mana, the power in her waves, felt the rumble in her ocean depths.....

I listened, rapt and silent, as he conjured from the cold black type the image of a woman of many years past, shivering in the chill predawn light as she waited for the sun to rise.

And sometimes—as on the morning of April 1, 1946—she would dream again of being

The images we impress upon our mind, especially when accompanied by emotion, yield the same experience whether they are true or fictional.

Making believe you know will get you farther than making believe you don't know.

All limits exist only in thought, and that is where they are overcome.

Only the fearful mind goes to catastrophic fantasies.

It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium.

Curiosity, after all, was what had driven mankind out from his isolated, unimportant world and across the gulf between the stars. It had also, he thoughtfully reminded himself, killed the figurative cat.

My mommy always said there were no such things as monsters. No real ones. But there are.

Building better worlds

I've never known a storyteller who was unhappy when telling stories.

And since he's written 126 novels and counting, I think that we can safely say Mr. Foster is one hell of an entertainer.

Alan Dean Foster

You've been so lonely, he murmured as he searched for what he needed. So afraid to leave. A thin smile crossed his face. At night, desperate to sleep, you'd imagine an ocean. I can see it . . . I can see the island.

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. Antoine de Saint-Exupery A

Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.

What is "secretly present in what he said about anything" is an openness to delight, to the sense that there's more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything.

To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.

Einstein once wrote, "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

My granddaughter asked me how far away the Sun is. That question I couldn't answer with apples and oranges. But if you traveled to the Sun on a high-speed train, say at two hundred miles per hour, it would take about fifty years. She nodded. To get to the nearest star beyond the Sun on the same train would take about fifteen million years.

The boundary between the known and the unknown constantly shifts. The other side is the "mysterious." That other side intrigues us, it stimulates us, it provokes us, it haunts us. And it produces new science, and new art.

In fact, this is a world without future. In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind. In this world, no person can imagine the future.

A spinster sees the face of the young man who loved her in the mirror of her bedroom, on the ceiling of the bakery, on the surface of the lake, in the sky.