Quotes About Imagination

The whole room is as black as pitch. In fact, I'm not at all sure that it is a room. Something suggests to me now that I'm on board ship; I might be floating adrift on some tranquil sea. And yet there's no sound, no motion, nothing to indicate either sea or land. Like a ghost train my life streams through my head, and I don't know which point of the compass I'm facing. How dark it is. The moon must have stolen away secretly.

I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines in the head.

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.

My eyes are an ocean in which my dreams are reflected.

Il reale e' a piu' strati, e l'intero Creato, quando si e' giunti ad analizzare fin l'ultimo strato, non risulta affatto reale, ma pura e profonda immaginazione

I resent people who use phrases like "my first," so the person they're speaking to is practically obliged to imagine them having sex to complete the sentence. It's not nice.)

Nature is the greatest developer of art.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [ Commencement Speech ; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Sometimes, when we look back on a great day as a kid, I wonder was it really as perfect as that, or have I just made it that way in my head . . .

had read so many paper-backs she was having trouble working out what was real life and what was fiction.

With science fiction there's endless possibilities.

Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.

A family mission statement formed in my head: 'We're a family that tells tall tales to add a little magic to our realism.

As long as we tell our urban ancestors' stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.

And our understanding of ourselves is deeply indebted to how we have imagined animality in the first place.

With Beijing Memory No. 5, what is uncanny is that the "machine" refuses to come to life, and in its lifelessness, imagines what life might have been. And it is in this very paradox of "might have been" that we experience the prospective and prosthetic quality of our ontology.

We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.

wrote that freedom of the press "is a deception." He mocked freedom of assembly as a "hollow phrase." As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than "a machine for the suppression of the working class." In the Bolshevik imagination, the press could be free, and public institutions could be fair, only once they were controlled by the working class—via the party.

satirist Caran d'Ache