“A fact will often show poor and plain in contrast to the leapings of imagination.”

A imaginação foi a companheira de toda a minha existência, viva, rápida, inquieta, alguma vez tímida e amiga de empacar, as mais delas capaz de engolir campanhas e campanhas, correndo.
Source: Dom Casmurro (1899), Ch. 40, p. 98.

Curtains (1961)
Context: Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

31 May 1830.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Source: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 412

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 7 : Passion for Form, p. 131
Context: The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways — at times in neurotic or paranoid ways — does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.

Source: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Island (1962)