Best 4697 quotes in «imagination quotes» category

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

What that song? I ast. Sound low down dirty to me. Like what the preacher tells you its sin to hear. Not to mention sing. She hum a little more. Something come to me, she say. Something I made up. Something you help scratch out my head.

What the future held for spirit, Emily could only imagine.

What these books and their like have done for me is tap into some roaming tendency of the mind; I know that I could never have done what these writers have done, been where they have been, pursued the interests they have pursued, but I want to know what it is like. We go to fiction to extend experience, to get beyond our own, For me, this kind of non-fiction writer is furnishing the same need--taking me out of my own comfortable expectations and showing me how it might be elsewhere. Armchair travel? Not quite. I have never believed that travel broadens the mind, having known some well-travelled minds that were nicely atrophied. Rather, these are books--experiences--that encourage a leap of the imagination.

What was once thought, so it shall become.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.

What we talk about less often, because it is harder to explain, is the way a perfume can give breath and body to the phantom selves that waft about us as we go through our days -- not just the showgirl, the femme fatale, and the ingenue, but all the memories and dreams of the taller, meaner, sharper, sweeter, softer people we have been or long to be.

What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience in the narrow circle of sedentary life.

What you desire is what you attract to yourself.

What would your shoes say about the things you do everyday?

What year is it in your imagination?

What you decide to be today, you will become tomorrow.

What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real.

What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don’t need to be wasted on naming things.

When a lie makes a soft bed for everyone, may the truth lie low. God as commonly understood appears to be one such lie. God as non-existence is not everyone's cup of tea and He better remain so.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

Whenever you play in the imaginative realm, you heighten your sensitivity to the supernal.

When God broke his deal with me, I turned to the Devil. In the end, I wasn't happy. I realized that the imagination of a perfect being was more limited than that of the imperfect one. Color me unimpressed by the Actus Purus.

When God created each of us, he tucked a little bit of his divine imagination into our souls. He did this, I think, so that we can conceive of the fact that our world contains so much more than we can see, feel, and touch.

When I am alone, I drink my tea with pinkie raised, like a kid playing "tea party." At times, a fancy British accent is involved. Dahling!

When ideas evaporate, when shapes fade and forms lose their integrity, our imagination can create an outlandish setting and convert everything into a hazy, misty Turner landscape. ("Back garden of a dream")

When imagination comes in action, creative things are likely to happen

When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated -- with the social consequences we know all too well.

When imagination changes from hoping to knowing, it makes things real.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

When I read, my mind had the tendency to wander around, embroiling itself in the common points between the plots and my life, feeling empathy for the characters' inner struggles, almost as if they were merging with my personal conflicts.

When Inspiration and imagination meet, words smile at us.

When it’s my turn, I fill my plate with rice, shami kabob, lentils, and butter chicken, skipping the cauliflower and salad, and pile the naan high before carefully carrying it downstairs to the basement. Rabiya, Yusuf, and the other kids are already camped in front of the TV with their food. Mustafa joins a few minutes later, plopping down on our beat-up leather sofa next to Yusuf. “There’s nothing good on,” Yusuf announces after flipping through all the channels. “Isn’t there a basketball game?” Mustafa asks. “Nooo!” Rabiya whines. “I want SpongeBob,” a little boy named Jamal says, chewing on a piece of naan. “How about we tell scary stories?” Yusuf suggests. “No way,” Rabiya refuses. “Last time I had nightmares for days.” I agree. Yusuf tells the scariest stories ever. The worst one was about severed hands of bodies that were dug up from graves. The hands came to life and would tickle people to death. I still think about that whenever we pass a graveyard.

When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]

When I was 30, I used to wonder when I was going to quit playing. Use disorder worry about it. Now, I know I'm never going to quit.

When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind. It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths. And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space. The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe. Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left behind. What if, this time, you fall?

When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

When I was a kid, I imagined flying holding balloons

When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.

When people wish for harmony, I wish for chaos. I'd rather see imaginative means of self-destruction, than to see laziness and wasted potential.

When people say writers spend a lot of time staring, rather than writing, do not be fooled. A writer does not blankly stare. Instead, she sees everything before her. Millions of plotting paths, endless words to choose from, and every possible outcome. Writers see their world as it is, as it could be; as it will be. And in the end make it as it should be.

When people are facing real hardships in their lives, they have no time to invent imaginary ones.

When purpose is tough , imagination becomes unshakable.

When scorching passion only leaves ashes of unfulfilled dreams, hope may entice the sprinkling magic of our imagination into livening up the footlights on a new stage of life. ("Taken for a ride")

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

When the artist leaves a painting on a wall with the full confidence that the mastery of his skill, soul and vision will draw others into its vortex long after he is gone, he is using the grip of seduction. When the musician’s performance, the manipulation of her instrument and the command of her talents are so raw and uninhibited that onlookers feel connected to the cosmos, bridged by the pure genius they are now experiencing, she is using the mystery of seduction. The unexplainable feeling fans get when the athlete ceases to be an athlete and rises to the level of the untouchable magician that can make anything happen, is nothing less than the power of seduction at work. The immense value of seduction is its ability to skillfully allure others into one’s world . . . .

When there is silence, Give your voice. When there is darkness, Shine your light. When there is desperation, Offer hope.

When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness, there are three things that can show you the way: instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation, creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.

When we are no longer children we are already dead

When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we seek their residues wherever we can trace them

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, “Wander no more. All is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.

When the writer cannot convince his Super-Ego of the "harmlessness" of his imagination, he has no ideas at all. If however, he clears that hurdle but cannot obtain approval of his (harmless) exhibitionism in "writing it down," he cannot write.