“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”

Source: Legacy of Lies & Don't Tell

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3

Quoted in John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 440; cited in Understanding Power http://www.understandingpower.com/Chapter9.htm#f16| (2002) by Noam Chomsky, ch. 9, footnote 16; originally from "The Need for a New Party" (1931) by John Dewey, Later Works 6, http://books.google.com/books?id=0xPFJ2uwpbIC&lpg=PA163&ots=dd3ciwpXoJ&dq=%22shadow%20cast%22%20dewey&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false| p. 163. (Via Westbrook.)
Misc. Quotes

Maxim 228 http://books.google.com/books?id=_QQSAAAAIAAJ&q="even+a+single+hair+casts+its+shadow"&pg=PA28#v=onepage
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...