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c2ce63c I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. 1929 viereck-interview imagination inspirational Albert Einstein
b2fb536 Everything you can imagine is real. imagination life inspirational art Pablo Picasso
8a6272f We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. choice inspiration imagination life attitude pretend Kurt Vonnegut
0b4c9b6 I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. imagination hope inspirational Robert Fulghum
34b420e "If you are a dreamer come in If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer If youre a pretender com sit by my fire For we have some flax golden tales to spin poetry imagination make-believe wisher liar wishes Shel Silverstein
4403452 Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions. imagination fantasy inspirational creativity Albert Einstein
821cd5e Children see magic because they look for it. magic imagination search children Christopher Moore
1ae9b65 "Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination." mind imagination heart Cornelia Funke
cdc7889 We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. imagination psychology William Shakespeare
daca326 Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning. imagination dreams inspirational possibility excitement dreaming planning Gloria Steinem
3e45173 Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. lover words earth poetry reason imagination fantasy love devils egypt helen lunatic madmen poet Shakespeare William Shakespeare
433c51f Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. women imagination proust Marcel Proust
b19ed6b The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. imagination fantasy dreams life Ian McEwan
c82246f It's strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what's real and what's imaginary. jason-mraz imagination dreams life love truth inspirational test Jason Mraz
ddc9d43 We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I'd never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own. imagination science humor inspirational Brian Andreas
b09470d Hate is a lack of imagination. hate imagination Graham Greene
8f9311d Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for. imagination life inspirational believe Betty Smith
0be7cc4 "Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for." imagination life inspirational Betty Smith
85a23dd "You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck. "Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful." imagination matilda Roald Dahl
e2ed34f Lovers and madmen have such seething brains Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. lovers reason imagination madmen William Shakespeare
90904f9 We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. magic imagination harvard-commencement-speech J.K. Rowling
ea8e26b An idea is salvation by imagination imagination inspirational art Frank Lloyd Wright
dcd0610 Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything imagination Henry Miller
643672b And people who don't dream, who don't have any kind of imaginative life, they must... they must go nuts. I can't imagine that. true imagination inspirational dreaming Stephen King
4b0f220 if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones. fiction reality imagination fantasy humor imaginary illusions on-fiction Norton Juster
68f3622 Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives. imagination Paulo Coelho
4a4cda7 They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing. imagination pretend school Margaret Atwood
ac3bd32 A daily dose of daydreaming heals the heart, soothes the soul, and strengthens the imagination. soothing imagination dreams strength heart inspirational imaginary-friend richelle richelle-goodrich healing pretending soul Richelle E. Goodrich
9571619 A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. dream imagination inspirational Yoko Ono
4ba0904 When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do. destiny identity imagination inspirational transcendence self transformation power creativity RuPaul
0adf4fe Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in. imagination horror Truman Capote
661e1c8 In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal. reality imagination inspirational eternity L.M. Montgomery
18a9d18 "In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal." reality imagination inspirational L.M. Montgomery
2fc72f9 When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. hatred imagination Graham Greene
228e835 Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven. imagination L.M. Montgomery
018cc60 Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things. writing imagination fantasy shadows L.M. Montgomery
1f8bcf9 Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. imagination modern-art skill Tom Stoppard
41a967c My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failures. imagination shallow intellect loyalty Oscar Wilde
f1da8aa Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. sleep imagination night David Almond
bc31f58 Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further. marriage imagination wedding Margaret Mitchell
3ccfc09 "Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time." artists freedom imagination Henry Miller
e991d50 Indeed, the human mind appeared to suffer from a crippling need to fabricate in the absence of concrete proof. imagination J.R. Ward
56893c4 Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs. imagination Milan Kundera
4ff18fc There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. story world imagination tale Cormac McCarthy
da9b264 my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me. imagination F. Scott Fitzgerald
650f331 I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us. imagination philosophy inspirational John Guare
7c45132 The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture--exploit the new thing then move on. There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are. literature reading freedom imagination wildness connection human-nature Jeanette Winterson
85dec4a It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth. theory imagination Madeleine L'Engle
c6e34aa A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong. imagination Raymond Chandler
eff5a68 I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that's why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with. imagination Harper Lee
1160079 "You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary -- it's always imaginary -- world in which I would like to live. writing imagination William S. Burroughs
c609590 I was very much provoked. Of course, I knew there are no fairies; but that needn't prevent my thinking there is. imagination L.M. Montgomery
71c60e3 The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination criticism imagination genius-stupidity nerdery critics art genius nerds nerd artist Nassim Nicholas Taleb
e207c5b When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind. It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths. And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space. The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe. Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left behind. imagination fantasy time-travel science-fiction Diana Gabaldon
19f5e10 Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life. imagination Michael Chabon
fd3e3b7 Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator. imagination creative-vision famous-artists famous-minds great-geniuses-of-world-history historic-inventors leonardo-da-vinci genius creativity Walter Isaacson
1bb3a20 Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing. imagination Alan Moore
fed4ae3 It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play us, and how conveniently we can imagine. imagination dreams dracula Bram Stoker
a8e9c94 "The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word." imagination language Alan Moore
ec5a2b9 And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. imagination privilege J.K. Rowling
2d6adf0 Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. imagination Oscar Wilde
d624444 The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level - there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort. imagination characters ideas readers writers Jim Butcher
ac0abfb Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. artists inspiration imagination art-and-life soul W. Somerset Maugham
f362f53 We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ca change. fiction imagination Ursula K. Le Guin
ee38d30 At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry's language, entering Henry's world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness. idealism poetry imagination Anaïs Nin
5afe9f2 O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide on man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play. theatre imagination chorus globe-theatre history-plays staging stage William Shakespeare
5dbbee1 When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way. mind imagination wisdom contradiction intellect Madeleine L'Engle
73ee9a5 That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone? witches imagination science humor perspicacity tiffany-aching geology Terry Pratchett
b972ab7 Well, I've had my fun; I've had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms--his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought--making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share--it smashed to atoms. imagination life truths invention Virginia Woolf
11b2731 There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination. imagination Virginia Woolf
637b199 Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic. magic reading imagination Ann-Marie MacDonald
ada9e20 A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing. imagination creation Salman Rushdie
0a52acf Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer? imagination dreams hope growing-up leaving Betty Smith
b0f8149 "The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising." [ exercise writing imagination revision failure Stephen King
6ad79b5 That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence. mind imagination psychology Tom Robbins
f9bcc3b Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. creative inspiration imagination imperfect imperfection creativity Jhumpa Lahiri
c4b8cff Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. imagination ugliness Betty Smith
a1edeba As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe. imagination quick-plot-summary crazy Libba Bray
53eb764 Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves. mankind imagination cities justice Mark Helprin
44af3ef I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. imagination inspirational monsters J.K. Rowling
62774ec But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended. fiction imagination intentional-fallcy ontology John Green
93953c2 By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling... But a world without feeling is a world without pain. pain imagination real-world peace Daniel Keyes
7e5482b Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment--a resentment which hides a bottomless terror--has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man's imagination makes of her--literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman's.--Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men. men women imagination love maturity capitalism James Baldwin
8c35e9f By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. writing imagination senses images Wallace Stegner
6fdede2 And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death. imagination habits initiative Dorothy Dunnett
8b80c86 "Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered." imagination my-life-story treasures labor Tad Williams
2bc6fff Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination. fiction imagination love Azar Nafisi
761a028 A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back? reading imagination Jeanette Winterson
75d5d66 Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. writing-life writing imagination Annie Dillard
cb9058b The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. reality imagination the-wind-up-bird-chronicle haruki-murakami murakami flee japanese flight japan imagine Haruki Murakami
156a698 We may see a Creature with forty-nine heads Who lives in the desolate snow, And whenever he catches a cold (which he dreads) He has forty-nine noses to blow. 'We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted Scrunch Who can chew up a man with one bite. It likes to eat five of them roasted for lunch And eighteen for its supper at night. 'We may see a Dragon, and nobody knows That we won't see a Unicorn there. We may see a terrible Monster with toes Growing out of the tufts of his hair. 'We may see the sweet little Biddy-Bright Hen So playful, so kind and well-bred; And such beautiful eggs! You just boil them and then They explode and they blow off your head. 'A Gnu and a Gnocerous surely you'll see And that gnormous and gnorrible Gnat Whose sting when it stings you goes in at the knee And comes out through the top of your hat. 'We may even get lost and be frozen by frost. We may die in an earthquake or tremor. Or nastier still, we may even be tossed On the horns of a furious Dilemma. 'But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill! Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge! Let's go rolling and bowling and spinning until We're away from old Spiker and Sponge! imagination james-and-the-giant-peach roald-dahl monsters Roald dahl
284f72f Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. literature imagination science Ray Bradbury
7b0b19c Where do you get dreams like this? imagination fantasy Stephen R. Donaldson
1b5e908 "The king was silent. "Ents!" he said at length. "Out of the shadows of legend I begin a little to understand the marvel of the trees, I think. I have lived to see strange days. Long we have tended our beasts and our fields, built our houses, wrought our tools, or ridden away to help in the wars of Minas Tirith. And that we called the life of Men, the way of the world. We cared little for what lay beyond the borders of our land. Songs we have that tell of these things, but we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of the strange places, and walk visible under the Sun." "You should be glad," Theoden King," said Gandalf. "For not only the little life of Men is now endangered, but the life also of those thing which you have deemed the matter of legend. You are not without allies, even if you know them not." "Yet also I should be sad," said Theoden. "For however the fortune of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?" -- war inspiration imagination hope J.R.R. Tolkien
12d514c What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. imagination life personal-joy the-world Hermann Hesse
c07bec7 "Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy." lover madness enlightenment illusion imagination love craving platohtenment divinity divine Thomas Moore
de2bd14 We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. heroes reading books imagination dreams Peter S. Beagle
ad7788f With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected and tortured after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves again. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? mind equality free books imagination education happiness intelligence conform breach burning examiners fliers grabbers imaginative-creators jumpers knowers moutains racers runners snatchers swimmers tinkerers bright intellectual critics target image dread judgment unfamiliar judge constitution rights cowardice bullying weapons different creativity torture school Ray Bradbury
37516c7 Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat. story imagination Salvador Plascencia
9cca028 In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you. present suicide young-adult youth future imagination beath decision teenager burden childhood dying Rebecca Solnit
ae74a83 Everyone's alone--or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other, And I'm sure they don't. Is that delusion? Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? imagination love everyone T.S. Eliot
7fdcde6 I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. reality imagination Eugène Ionesco
5e155ed How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. spirit imagination Terry Tempest Williams
14f1e63 Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. imagination restlessness Charlotte Brontë
fae5dcf "I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me. I missed them all, through deliberate negligence, Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come. independence freedom imagination escapism introvert Fernando Pessoa
8eef185 It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. imagination responsibilities Haruki Murakami
b5ed59f You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams. responsibility imagination dreams Haruki Murakami
2791569 The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. story literature imagination science-fiction Ursula K. Le Guin
478b65c Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had. imagination Terry Pratchett
8afa5d3 "It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: "In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise." [...] Just like Adolf Eichmann caught up in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler. - Oshima" responsibility imagination eichmann kafka-on-the-shore murakami Haruki Murakami
a73c04c All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy's. imagination heartwrenching teddy-todd alternate-universe twist-ending tearjerker kate-atkinson last-lines heartbreaking what-if ending sad Kate Atkinson
f7c2519 The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein. imagination José Saramago
0495200 Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another! mankind hopes future faith imagination religion dreams illusions disagreement vain-hopes ignorance H. Rider Haggard
61bc21b In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames. writing imagination obviousness middle-ages fire Umberto Eco
d2bdba3 IV The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels. V If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man. VI If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot. VII The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. imagination limitation wishful-thinking possession William Blake
8f94395 "The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story." imagination narrative storytelling Pat Conroy
3e96716 I don't say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she outgrew them. One simply faded away as another came. Things are very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles. imagination hope love-deferred singleness L.M. Montgomery
8fc4e34 When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing. imagination friendship naivety sisters Audrey Niffenegger
98bcb25 He hurried to car and set off home, hoping he was imagining things, which he had never hoped before, because he didn't approve of imagination. imagination vernon-dursley J.K. Rowling
6a79171 It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid. imagination E.M. Forster
5d64a0e "Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant . The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. greed imagination education-reform eye-opening standardized-testing school-reform capitalism human-nature creativity Noam Chomsky
8655986 Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill. imagination benign-neglect parenting curiosity childhood Annie Dillard
66e3431 Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. writing imagination heartbreak trade-in disappointment writers Ann Patchett
fa70911 To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything. imagination living-to-the-full Henry Miller
815c2a9 Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. imagination inspirational J.K. Rowling
ec0f1c4 "It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again." work imagination success creativity-work grit creativity Jonah Lehrer
31fbb57 I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn't see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people's clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn't be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn't be satisfactory at all--or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision(tm), a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit. kids imagination Bill Bryson
6dbf94d Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. photography time dream future past imagination life snapshot kodak-moment pause clear clarity worry moment regret nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
8982bb4 "Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. "Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?" "It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one." Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms. "Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?" "It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all." "Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah. "No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world." The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart. "Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")" time dream secret death imagination fantasy innocence knowledge night creativity Daphne du Maurier
de3b30a What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts. [...] in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy-tales. Not hunger, not cruelty, not my parents, but these tales which promised that sleeping in the snow never caused pneumonia, that bread never turned stale, that trees blossomed out of season, that dragons could be killed with courage, that intense wishing would be followed immediately by fulfillment of the wish. Intrepid wishing, said the fairytales, was more effective than labor. The smoke issuing from Aladdin's lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from fairytales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read. imagination fairytales Anaïs Nin
d005c7f When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword) imagination parenthood John Irving
af204e5 "And suddenly it came to him. That Strawberry Fields garden he'd come from, and the Freedom Tower he'd been thinking of: taken together, didn't they contain the two words that said it all about this city, the two words that really mattered? It seemed to him that they did. Two words: the one an invitation, the other an ideal, an adventure, a necessity. "Imagine" said the garden. "Freedom" said the tower. Imagine freedom. That was the spirit, the message of this city he loved. You really didn't need anything more. Dream it and do it. But first you must dream it." freedom imagination inspirational imagine new-york-city Edward Rutherfurd
6b44ec5 If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an 'oomph,' this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, 'Well, that is the funny behavior of the 'oomph. theory imagination science explainability rigor scrutiny rationalization pseudoscience Richard P. Feynman
c2db8ce What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. words writing imagination Blake Crouch
028e532 I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body. imagination estrangement exile stranger visions Fernando Pessoa
78cb030 "Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination." imagination Betty Smith
91d5b34 Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes. reading fiction imagination reading-experience madame-bovary characters Gustave Flaubert
171d740 The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions. fiction imagination science science-fiction Ray Bradbury
49bef17 "...Do you think there's somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?" Mandy blurted out. "You mean when you die, where will you end up?" Alecto asked her. "...I wouldn't know... back to whatever void there is, I suppose." "I've thought about it... every living thing dies alone, it'll be lonely after death," Mandy sighed sadly. "That freaks me out, does it scare you?" "I don't want to be alone," Alecto replied wearily. "We won't be, though. We'll be dead, so we'll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness." "I don't want to be any of that either though," Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. "When we die, we'll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything'll just be nothing!" "You're real though, at least that's something," Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly." time grief heaven depression death imagination sadness truth frightened disturbing grim spooky nirvana funeral purgatory void misery scary kill dead lost dying nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
1d4f614 If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people -- a very few people, but a few novelists are among them -- are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature -- [...] anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently, he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. literature imagination movement novel E.M. Forster
a0633e4 The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant. imagination thought Azar Nafisi
e690826 "Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1")" fear death imagination death-penalty death-sentence electric-chair execution Cornell Woolrich
61bef8e "YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!" literature imagination John Irving
97937a3 Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands. imagination da-vinci Sarah Dunant
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