Imagination Quotes

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I begin by imagining The impossibleAnd end by accomplishingThe impossible.

~ Sri Chinmoy

Memory is imagination in reverse.

~ Stephen Evans

Because, when everything else is gone, all we're left with is our imaginations.

~ Sarra Manning

Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.

~ Mary Balogh

Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.

~ Salvador Plascencia

Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

~ Charlotte Brontë

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.

~ Herbert Marcuse

IV   The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.V   If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.VI   If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.VII   The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.

~ William Blake

...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.

~ Ken Kesey

…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination

~ H.g. Wells

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.

~ Terry Eagleton

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.

~ A.s. Byatt

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

~ Rebecca Solnit

He's like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.

~ Robin Sloan

Imagination is the parallel universe of a writer. If he is not responding to you in this world, he is probably responding to someone in the imaginary world.

~ Heenashree Khandelwal

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.

~ José Saramago

It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.

~ Mark Lawrence

Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.

~ Mark Lawrence

The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.

~ Grant Morrison

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

~ Washington Irving

I have a habit of letting my imagination run away from me. It always comes back though . . . drenched with possibilities.

~ Valaida Fullwood

Yet magic is no more the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.

~ Anna Godbersen

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

~ Siri Hustvedt

In the world of imagination, all things belong.

~ Richard Hugo

One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

~ Mary Maclane

Ideas that don't even exist have the power to destroy the world.

~ Lionel Suggs

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

~ Chang-Rae Lee

We live in the world we made up.

~ Jim Paul

I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding.

~ Jean Webster

You are...beyond my imagination. It's a wonder you can be touched at all.

~ Meredith Duran

Ah? A small aversion to menial labor? The doctor cocked an eyebrow. Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.

~ Tad Williams

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

~ Haruki Murakami

Tis to create, and in creating live        A being more intense, that we endow        With form our fancy, gaining as we give        The life we image, even as I do now.        What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,        Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,        Invisible but gazing, as I glow        Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.

~ George Gordon Byron

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

~ Gertrude Atherton