Quotes About Imagination

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

It's like kids playing house: 'You play the father, I'll play the mother.' You know, you dress up, you play, they pay, you go home. It's a game - acting's a game.

They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep." "Then

Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.

I saw that — that black thing squatting like an ape among the branches, leering down at me.

I can say with confidence that no man, however mature, ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me."—Robert E. Howard (from One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis)

A fantastic idea had birth in his mind and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth.

Me estremecí al imaginar el insondable abismo de tiempo que se abre entre el presente y aquella época en que la tierra se estremeció, levantando como una ola aquellas montañas azules que cubrieron cosas inconcebibles.

Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet)." - Vimalananda

This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.

Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real.

We must be careful what we imagine, fear, or hope for. The echoes of our thought live on in eternity.

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel -- can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top -- doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor.

What it leads to is the mischief of confusing liturgy with magic -- of imagining there are only a handful of properly effective formulas for conjuring up the mystery, when in fact the mystery is always at work, independent of any formula whatsoever.

We spend our lives invoking upon ourselves imagined necessities, creating God in the image of our own fears - and all the while, he is beating us over the head with the balloon of grace and the styrofoam baseball bat of a vindicating judgment. The history of salvation is slapstick all the way, right up to and including the end.

epresentative

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Some men see things as they are and ask, 'why' I dream things that never were and ask, 'why not'NB This quote is a paraphrase from a similar quote by G. B. Shaw.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Creating is no problem - problem solving is not creating.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A poem… begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.

First there's the children's house of make believe,Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,The playthings in the playhouse of the children.Weep for what little things could make them glad.