Quotes About Imagination

When talking about speculations, a man dreams, and money decides.

The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us.

Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.

Look at those clouds, said Jamie, gazing up at the sky. Look at them. Yes, said Isabel. They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them. Look at the shape of the clouds, she said. What do you see in those beautiful clouds, Jamie? I see you, he said.

There are some very inventive adults, Mma. When you listen to them, you have to divide everything they say by two, and then take away ten. As you have to do with some politicians.

Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.

Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.

We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.

there was always a part of the human mind that was prepared to entertain such notions, particularly at night, in the world of shadows, when there were sounds that one could not understand and when each one of us was in some sense alone.

Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.

He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.

This had happened because she had been able to make that sudden imaginative leap that lies at the heart of our moral lives: the ability to see, even for a brief moment, the world as it is seen by the other person. It is this understanding that lies behind all kindness to others, all attempts to ameliorate the situation of those who suffer, all those acts of charity by which we make our lives something more than the pursuit of the goals of the unruly ego.

She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things...and when to war over them.

Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.

Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they're often pleasantly surprised.

La poésie: cette sauce dont on recouvrait la réalité pour lui donner meilleur goût.

She imagined herself lying in the vegetable tray, perhaps, while Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni leaned against the icebox. It would be a refreshing alternative to the heat.

He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people's affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary potatoes Dauphinoise.

It defeated him that anybody could ever bring such a result about if they knew, or could imagine, the heartbreak of the victim's family. Of course the people who did these things were usually deficient in moral imagination—they could not see what it would be like because they simply lacked the capacity to do so.

Without imagination we find it more difficult to be good, because imagination enables us to understand the pain of others: destroy imagination and you destroyed empathy.

People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theory, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not.

Why not imagine a talk with a pumpkin? Why not imagine going off for a drive with a friendly pumpkin, a companion who would not, after all, answer back; who would agree with everything you said, and would at the end of the day appear on your plate as a final gesture of friendship?

We were all different, she thought, and it was important to remind oneself of that. It was important, too, to imagine what it must be like to be another person. That was a simple thing to do, and its effect could be salutary.

But that's what the world is all about, Jamie. Stories. Stories explain everything, bring everything together.