Quotes about imagination

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“… [T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.”

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

“Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.”

“Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.”

“What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.”

“So now I'm thinking about it. I'm imagining sitting down with my parents and actually saying, "I'm gay." And you know what? It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don't have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls.”

“You're imagining things. Clearly, my stunning beauty has clouded your mind. -Rose Hathaway”

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

“Nonsense, do you imagine he has thought as much of you as you have of him?”

“Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.”

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”

“To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

“It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

“An idea is salvation by imagination”

“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

“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.”

“Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.”

“What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”

“But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova.”

“Just then, my phone started ringing. The ring must have been damaged by the water as well, so now it had a high, keening note - kind of the sound I imagine a mermaid might make if you punched her in the face.”

“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”

“Through imagination, we can visualize the uncredited worlds of potential that lie within us.”

“The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination — what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not.”

“The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.”

“I'm not saying it because I'm sweet. I'm saying it because I love you now and I always have. More than you can imagine.”

“Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.”

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

“Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.”

“Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.”

“The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.”

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

“A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.”

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

“I thought I could make out Jamie's Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded equally demented.”

“There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.”

“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture… Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.”

“Girls had to believe in anything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.”

“Imagination means nothing without doing.”

“Half of my heart's got a real good imagination, half of my heart's got you… Half of my hearts got a right mind to tell you that half of my heart won't do.”

“Fantasy leaves imaginations larger than it finds them.”

“A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind.”

“What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.”

“No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.”

“In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.”

“It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”

“… along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

“Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize… Vienna waits for you.”

“When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

“We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.”

“Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.”

“Faith ― acceptance of which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”

“How amazing it is that friendships can become so full that you can't imagine what your life was like before them.”

“Look at your body—
A painted puppet, a poor toy
Of jointed parts ready to collapse,
A diseased and suffering thing
With a head full of false imaginings.”

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

“Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”

“… so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time and its only renewal came from giving it away.”

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

“Imagine the uproar if the Federal government tried to make everyone wear a radio transmitter around their neck so we can keep track of their movements. But people happily carry their cell phones in their purses and pockets.”

“You said there was nothing in the world you wanted" The Queen's eyes glittered. "When you imagine your life without him, do you still feel the same?”

“I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”

“… there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.”

“For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.”

“How potent is the fancy! People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination.”

“I am ignoring you. In fact, I think you are a figment of my imagination.”

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection.”

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

“In the blink of an eye, something happens by chance - when you least expect it - sets you on a course that you never planned, into a future you never imagined.”

“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew.”

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

“Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.”

“Calvin: Girls are like slugs—they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what.
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“Cupid, you worthless bastard, I summon you to human form! (Julian)
Gee, I can't imagine why he wouldn't respond to that. (Grace)”

“It’s a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn’t want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do.”

“One of the things he'd always loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic.”

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

“The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.”

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

“Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.”

“The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.”

“All these things that crib and cab in your brain, in your imagination, are in fact things that might well in later life drive you insane.”

“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”

“You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

“If you've seen a crab's mouth, all foamy and gross with whiskers and snapping bits, you can imagine this one didn't look any better blown up to billboard size.”

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.”

“for 100,000 (dollars), you [can] flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it [takes] to destroy something than it [does] to build it in the first place.”

“There are some people who will never understand what
loyalty means. They could tell you what it was, of course,
but they will never know. They will never see it from the inside.
They couldn't imagine a world where something like that was real.”

“You’ll just have to imagine”

“Everything to be imagined is an image of truth.”

“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”

“As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

“All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.”

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

“It's me," said Jace. "Watching me play Scrabble is enough to make most women swoon. Imagine if I actually put in some effort.”

“Things change…things happen…things you can’t even imagine when you’re young and full of hope.”