Quotes About Imagination

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there's a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life." ? C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Our thinking has many sources.

No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would give years of our life to acquire.

Las naturalezas creativas no son especulativas. Eso las distingue de los imitadores.

Everything dreamed because it was alive, and everything lived because it was permitted to dream.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write 'micrograms', (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

El lector verdadero está siempre leyendo un libro -o dos, o tres o diez- y la novedad llega como una molestia -a veces irritante, a veces agradable, a veces incluso deseada- en el seno de esa actividad ininterrumpida. Donde, no sin esfuerzo, deberá conquistar un espacio, si no cae antes de las manos del lector. Este, entonces, volverá felizmente a ese otro libro que estaba leyendo porque eso es precisamente lo que tenía ganas de hacer.

the relation of mathematics to the world of temporal change and of phenomenal particularity is direct: less by induction than by what Pierce called abduction – an imaginative jumping off from an open-ended series of particulars.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....

The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he -- because he usually doesn't know any Greek -- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination.

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.

Oh, yes, there was a witch; there are always witches where there are children.

Although blaming traffic for being that late seemed almost comical to him, he held back from calling her on what he imagined was a passive-aggressive stunt.

Without new visions, we don't know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

I didn't want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.

I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.

What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?