“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”
Source: Atonement
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Ian McEwan80
British author 1948Related quotes
“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene,”
Ulysses (1922)
Context: It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness... (271)
“Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy”
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
"An Unexpected Meeting"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence,
all smiles, past help.
Our humans
don't know how to talk to one another.

“His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician
On John Dryden (1828)
“So rapid is the flight of dreams upon the wings of imagination.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist
“Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IV
Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America
Book Three, Chapter XI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three