Imagination Quotes

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any real map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

~ Siri Hustvedt

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I believe we can find God in many ways. I believe our heavenly parents seek us out wherever we live, whether that be strictly in the mind, in despair and joy, in an office, or in nature. It is sometimes hard to recognize them or their efforts because we have already written their parts, made up our minds about what a spiritual life looks like. I know for sure, though, that when I stop and enter that space where my children are most comfortable--a space of play, imagination, and possibility--calmness enters in as I believe again that many things are possible.

~ Ashley Mae Hoiland

Even in Sri Lanka, the worst only happened in my imagination, I'd say, and this is so because we live on a planet where good people outnumber bad.

~ Tania Aebi

We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Perhaps we shouldn't try to answer the questions now - let's just note them down. Maurice always said the power in a question is not in the answer, it's in the way the imagination gets busy when the question is at work.

~ Jacqueline Winspear

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.

~ Azar Nafisi

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals--some almost real, other deliciously bogus-- to spark child's fantasies and gallop grownups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It pleased Antonina that her zoo offered on orient of fabled creatures, where book pages sprang alive and people could parley with ferocious animals.

~ Diane Ackerman

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

~ Catherine The Great

There are never any rules, rights, or wrongs in imagining--- imagining just is.

~ Pamela Zagarenski

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.

~ Roland Barthes

Fairy tales were the door to the world of imagination for me as a child, that land I often lived in when real life wasn’t quite enough.

~ Regan Walker

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

~ Tim Ingold

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Catia M Rodrigues

HIPPOLYTABut all the story of the night told over,And all their minds transfigured so together,More witnesseth than fancy’s imagesAnd grows to something of great constancy,But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

~ William Shakespeare

You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.

~ Charles Dickens

It is extraordinary how the human mind sees what it anticipates and is blind to anything that could not be dreamed of.

~ Tracy Rees

Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind’s ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind’s ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Imagination is a storm of emotions that has the power to sweep citadels into the wind.

~ Saim .A. Cheeda

To live with imagination is to play among the stars.

~ J. M. Kessler

When you use your imagination, it is a bit like putting on night-vision goggles to see forms in the shadows of your head, heart, and spirit.

~ Deborah Sandella

Theatre is pure teleportation by means of suspension. It’s a voyage into the archives of the human imagination. A passport to all what ifs.

~ Natasha Tsakos

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

~ Graham Greene

To claim to understand, is a statement that only your imagination could conceive.

~ R.w. Erskine

If I had one wish,for who I could be,I would be a fishafloat in the sea...

~ Tate Flynn

Imagination's better half can sometimes tilt it's heavy head and wink, as if to say, That's the way!And I'd be off at a trot wherever it led.

~ George Messo

So much of love is imagination -- its over-activity, its over-ambition, its over-the-top faith.

~ Gerry Lafemina

In the beginning, science is a thing imagined; in the beginning, war is a thing imagined; in the beginning, love is a thing imagined; in the beginning, even God is a thing imagined. There is nothing that has not first been imagined. Even before there are words, there is imagination.

~ Bakhtiyar Ali

I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars

~ Simone De Beauvoir

As a writer, I'm always at the mercy of my inspiration, my intuition, and my imagination.

~ Kate Collier

Everything in this world is the fruit of the imagination. If there is no imaginary garden in our head, we can't plant a real one.

~ Bakhtiyar Ali

Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;They make faces, and think they understand each other,And I’m sure they don’t. Is that delusion?Can we only loveSomething created in our own imaginations?

~ T.s. Eliot

How a plain and wagon on Mulberry Street, Grows into a story that no one can beat

~ Dr. Seuss

How a Plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street, Grows into a story Thet no one can beat

~ Dr. Seuss

Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don't be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don't let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe!

~ Nick Cave