Quotes About Imagination

The lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

a God so holy we may not take his name into our mouths, whose nature is to be inapprehensible. . . . This is the grandest, purest concept of God, and one which story can do nothing with, which the human imagination constantly betrays [Our Dream of the Good God, Out of the Garden ].

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

To vault from the trenches of habitual thinking -- that is the birth of genius. Traussbery

Ideen braucht man nur, wenn man nichts erlebt

That's the beauty of a book—through its characters, you can imagine your life outside your life.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.

But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.

The proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook takes from the cupboard is not the same thing as what is in the cupboard.

This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

She had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaid to wear brightly flowered dresses to fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. What Scarlet O'Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.

Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin

I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me - to have! to know! to wear! - her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.

Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana? No. I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana' He sighed. It was just this thing in the middle of a field.

That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck

If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, to sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

A short story is photograph. A novel is a film.

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.