Quotes About Imagination

Once you go blind, unfortunately, words are all you've got.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go back down, into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

She's the one I carried my bones to and built a house that was just a cot and built a life that was over an hour and built a castle where no one lives and built, in the end, a song to go with the ceremony.

In a dream, you are never eighty.

and only as she dreamt of the yellow hair did moonlight sift into her mouth.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

She like imaginary men best of all.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul — chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I'm joining the circus. Although I'm happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.