Quotes About Imagination

The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams.

our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life

I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef—I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.

509 sat down with his back to the barrack wall. It had still kept some warmth from the sun. Bucher came and sat down beside him. Strange, he said. Sometimes hundreds die and one doesn't feel anything, and then a single man dies, one who doesn't even concern us much—and it seems as though it were a thousand. 509 nodded. Imagination cannot count. And feeling does not grow stronger through numbers. It can never count beyond one. One—but that's enough if one feels it.

I never really had any God at all, just an imagined one, an inherited ghost.

Only Poe could have dreamed the rest.

I think my thought and imagination contain the picture and perceive its significance from every point of view. I have to force myself not to dwell upon it to avoid the sort of numbness that comes from deep apprehension and dwelling upon elements too vast to be yet comprehended or in any way controlled by counsel.

Late that afternoon, he devoted two quiet hours to his Old South, losing himself in another, more chivalrous age.

She saw Hitler as "a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin." Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously.

he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as "freak dinners"—perhaps most notably the "Gondola Party" he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel's courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.

gin daisy, which

You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it will be lovely.

look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion—that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest reaches of the ocean.

Once, in a time long past when men believed they could part mountains, a very different building stood in the Wal-Mart's place, and behind its mist-clouded windows ninety-three children who did not know better happily awaited the coming of the sea.

Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir ine's blood.

Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face." That word: television. In 1900.

French endurance was the cornerstone of British defensive strategy. That France might fall was beyond imagining.

Isn't a bookshop, to some extent, a temple to Browsing?

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there.

Man must always imagine and believe in a second reality or a better world than the one that is given him by nature.

William James said long ago, solitude is the greatest terror of childhood.

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

Is not the clay pit of which you speak that in which you fashioned exceedingly unsymmetrical imitations of rat-pies in your childhood?