“If I propose something distant, you may sayː interesting, but utopian. If I propose something close, you may answerː feasible but trivial. In contemporary efforts to think and talk programmatically, all proposals are made to seem either utopian or trivial. We have lost confidence in our ability to imagine structural change in society, and fall back upon a surrogate standardː a proposal is realistic if it approaches what already exists. It is easy to be a realist if you accept everything.”

Source: Behold, Here's Poison

"The Porter settled that some time ago," said the Second Voice. "Train for Niggle's Parish in the bay."
Leaf by Niggle (1945)

Rival Caesars (1903)

Algernon, Act I
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

1960s, Letter to Ho Chi Minh (1967)

“Make it ten,” Foote said, “and I’ll enjoy it even more.”

Chapter 37 (pp. 151-152)
Victim Prime (1987)

L.A. Cooper and R.N. Shepard (1984). "Turning something over in the mind." Scientific American 251(6), 106-114; p. 114.
Context: In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.

News conference following the 25th OSCE Ministerial Council, Milan, Italy (7 December 2018)

Source: Women in Love