c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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, The Sick Bag Song
purple threaded evening. a torn goddess laying on the roof. milk sky. lavender hued moan against hot asphalt. the thickness of evening presses into your throat. polaroids taped to the ceiling. ivy pouring out of the cracks in the wall. i found my courage buried beneath molding books and forgot to lock the door behind me. the old house never forgets. opened my mouth and a dandelion fell out. reached behind my wisdom teeth and found sopping wet seeds. pulled all of my teeth out just to say i could. he drowned himself in a pill bottle and the orange really brought out his demise. lay me down on a bed of ground spices. there’s a song there, i know it. amethyst geode eyes. cracked open. no one saw it coming. october never loved you. the moon still doesn’t understand that.
— Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal
​You are only limited by your imagination.
— Abhijit Naskar
Infinite horizons belong to those who have infinite imagination!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In your imagination, 16,000 animals can fit into a boat that is only 440 feet long, 73 feet wide and 44 feet high. You can even decapitate a boy and then fit an elephant’s head on his headless body to bring him back to life. You can construct a demon with as many as ten heads and conceive him to be immortal unless he is hit at his navel. As far as your imagination is concerned, there is no boundary to perception.
— Abhijit Naskar
But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don't possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It's as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed.
— Thomas M. Disch, The Businessman
I see nobody on the road,' said Alice'I only wish I had such eyes,' The King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Whether we know it or not, our lives are acts of imagination and the world is continually re-imagined through us.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I wake up to find magic, I seek dreams and I crave imagination. This is my creed.
— Anastasia Bolinder
They say I don’t exist. They say I am an extension, an indulgence, imagination of a schizophrenic person.
— Faiz Shaikh
I live in my own head and it all makes sense to me.
— Tyler, the Creator
There are so many wonderful places created in my mind simply from the books I have read, I have been transported to some unforgettable, magic places but there are so many more I wish to visit and so little time that I fear I never will.
— Roxie Hibberd (Smith ) ME
A child-like mind is full of imagination.
— Pearl Zhu, Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future
So [in mathematics] we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do ... The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.
— Paul  Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
In this kind of personal artwork, jettison any idea that you can help yourself or others by interpreting, praising, or criticizing. These kinds of creative pieces and experiences are only for being with. The only helpful response is to nourish the imagination and your piece by associating other images to it and noticing what feelings it evokes in you.
— Jill Mellick, The Art of Dreaming: Tools for Creative Dream Work
He’s fine. Every time any of us are late you imagine we’re dead. You are no longer allowed to imagine anyone is dead.”“I’m not imagining he’s dead,” I whisper, but I’m totally imagining him bleeding to death on the snowy forest floor. Crows circle above him. A pixie arrow juts out of his beautiful chest. It’s the same thing I imagined about Devyn last week when he forgot to check in.“You are such a liar-liar pants-on-fire.” Is kisses my cheek in her sweet friend way. “But I love you.”“I just worry about people,” I whisper back. “If I’m not the one out there I feel so helpless.”Coach Walsh notices we’re talking. “Girls, pay attention. And no kissing.”Everyone starts snickering. I let go of Issie’s goose-bump covered arm. My face gets hot, which means I’m in insane blush mode. Nick thinks insane blush mode is cute. I bend down and check on my ankle bracelet that Nick gave me. It’s gold and thin-chained. A tiny dolphin dangles off of it. The dolphin reminds me of Charleston because they swim right off the Battery. Next to it dangles a heart, which just reminds me of love—corny but true. I’m so afraid of losing the anklet, but I can’t take it off. I adore it that much.
— Carrie Jones, Captivate
Imagine reality,reality will imagine you.
— Rajesh Walecha
It’s tragic how the lack of imagination so often shapes our defeat.
— Janny Wurts, To Ride Hell’s Chasm
Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times
—  myth is about what happens to people all of the time.
At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you didn't have a real good imagination you'd probably think those noises were the sounds of some kid blowing a horn for the first time, but I knew better than that. I could tell those were the squeaks and squawks of one door closing and another one opening.
— Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
Since it doesn't cost a dime to dream, you'll never short change yourself when you stretch your imagination.
— Robert Schuller
Every song I am listening toIt has an imaginary story about you.
— Ahmed Ali Anjum
Your ingenuity will remain dormant until it is provoked
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: ‘To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.
— Colin Duriez, The Return of the Ring Volume I: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Conference 2012
The Human Being, as we imagine it, does not exist.
— Nelson Rodrigues
Speculative fiction both requires and rewards an open mind.
— Steven Poore
The ability to be tough-minded remains useful; but by now, the fact that we are all in trouble in terms of both nature and culture can only be denied by those who become overly conservative and blindly reactionary. The more tender-hearted imagination that suggests we are all in this together and that there must be an underlying unity in life may be the only way to survive.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.
— Ettore Scola
Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
— Gloria Steinem
Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People’s lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Imagination can create crazy things in a place you don't know.
— Mina Marial Nicoli, The Magic of Avalon Eyrelin
The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.
— Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991
Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
— Hallie Lord, On the Other Side of Fear: How I Found Peace
She was a pixie, a fairy, full of imagination and in another world.
— Jean Nathan, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright
Humankind’s struggle against a hostile environment causes people throughout the ages to deploy their full armory of logic, training, strategy, imagination, inventiveness, and creativity. We are born with the natural ability to strategize. The most influential tool in humankind’s intellectual tool kit is the ability to regenerate a sense of unruffled alertness, to establish a poised stance that leads to intuitive discoveries generated by the conscious and unconscious mind constantly filtering a plethora of data, selecting critical facts, and producing elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble dilemmas.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Lila!" he said cheerfully. "So you aren't a figment of my brothers imagination after all.
— V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows
The most beautiful word in the dictionary is IMAGINATION.
— Auliq-Ice
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
My perception of your beauty was far more erotic than your real beauty! Am I to be blamed for taking too much effort on my part in beautifying you or did you fail in seducing me?
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
— Sigmund Freud
Novelty is the fuel on which the imagination runs.
— R.A.Delmonico
The imagination goes where it will, you can be set aloft by it, or you can cage it with reason.
— R.A.Delmonico
The more children there are in the world, the more the world is filled with imagination.
— R.A.Delmonico
Knowledge dilutes imagination.
— R.A.Delmonico
Learning to open the taps of your imagination leads to abundance & success unlimited.
— Auliq-Ice
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. ("A Father's Story")
— Andre Dubus, Selected Stories
Don't be a martyr to your imagination.
— Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things
Our imagination is God’s ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can’t see only because we’ve yet to create them.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation...to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
— John Keats
When you see something impossible, this is often because you have a limited imagination!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For all the girls in all the worlds.May you feel strength with your first breath,realize your unlimited potential for greatness on your second, and follow your dreams on your third.
— C.S. O'Kelly
Once an angel said to the dreamer, "You will get whatever you want in your life in this world and from this world".
— Newpostcard
Science have imagination, most people doubt about that. This word "Doubt" makes a lot of stuff interesting.
— Deyth Banger
Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.
— Joy Williams
Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?
— N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.
— Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
I told my imagination to discontinue communication with my thoughts.
— Gina Marinello-Sweeney, The Rose and the Sword
Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son.
— Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
Worry is using the incredible gift of your imagination to infuse life into something you never want to see in your world.
— Elle Sommer
The Imagination is one of the important stuff to be creative from there to be a creator!
— Deyth Banger
Wonder is a beautiful bliss.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I heard that Stephen King doesn't sleep well,... so I gues that he doesn't sleep well from his imagination. If I had the same imagination I won't sleep too!
— Deyth Banger
Wondering is a positive madness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Is the moon walking,Or the clouds are joking?Is the wind passing,Or my hair is dancing?Is the night dark,Or my eyes are blank?Are the wolfs howling,Or my heart is screaming?Is the day arousing,Or my mind is shining?Is the world staring,Or I'm peeping?Is this alright to write,Or I'm mistaking?
— Irfa Adam
Look beyond what you see.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You have only one life. So, live it happy with whatever conditions you have. Don't let others destroy your imagination and the world you are living in, and don't even listen to what they have to say about you. When you give more weight to other's opinions than your own thoughts, you will end up living their unattainable life instead of yours..
— NOT A BOOK
Eureka" can be an answer to a question we have never asked. It can be the articulation of a sudden and unforeseen idea or the expression of a magic moment that throws us into a new world. It acts like a radiant sunbeam that comes out of the blue and illuminates a dim past, opening a new, dynamic horizon. It may even be a trivial but lucky encounter with new friends, who let us be what we are in our imagination: original and undifferentiated. (“Waiting for Eureka” )
— Erik Pevernagie
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")
— Erik Pevernagie
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
— J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
Wonder is an open heaven to wisdom.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Why is it, I wonder, that Sigmar felt compelled to burden you with such poor imaginations? Very well. Judicate me, if you can.
— David Guymer, The Beasts of Cartha
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.
— Michael R. French
I do not see any numbers or anything
—  I only see some letters in bold letters that look like YOU.
People are seen through the stained glass window of our imagination. ( "The hidden sides of his character" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
— Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm
—  whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination
Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?
— Walter Brueggemann, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture
Three things to help keep your brain cells awake and alert ... drink plenty of clean water, get plenty of deep sleep, and let your imagination soar to places it's never dared venture.
— Toni Sorenson
The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.
— Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Through the imagination and the human sense of creativity, the book will examine not only raw clinical data but philosophical perspectives as well. As within many moral fables, animals will be used, at times, to convey a a fundamental truth of human nature. More simply stated, animals that elicit human empathetic responses, will be examined in a religious context. So, starting with cats, dogs and ultimately other primates, as moral experiments of imagination, we can perhaps understand differing cognitive processes that could have shaped our religious purview. It might be even stated that they should shape our opinion, especially in a reevaluation of the spiritual present and coming future. When this happens, it will help humanity create a unique pristine outlook on its religious traditions.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
The missions were always changing- sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.
— Michelle Cuevas, Beyond the Laughing Sky
The fort.Where the pair stored their painted scenes and books of made-up languages, their two-man band, and the tiny matchbox bed plus accessories that they made in case, someday, their experiments in the world of shrinking finally panned out.
— Michelle Cuevas, Beyond the Laughing Sky
Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.
— Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King
Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.
— Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin
The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
If imagination is your wealth, then ideas are your abode.
— Debasish Mridha
We wonder to write.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I get mixed up with the life we led and the life I imagined
— John J. Geddes
Human cultures construct an enormous variety of environments through language, technology, and institutions. We are born in and die in these systems of symbols and imagination.
— William E. Paden
Explore your sacred mind.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The limits of your imagination create the boundaries of your world.
— Debasish Mridha
To find the nectar of life, let me get lost in the mysteries and beauties of the imagination.
— Debasish Mridha
Our imaginations are so stilted. The very thought of being like Jesus is breathtaking.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Our schedules are so hectic we can’t get everything done, or else we are bored and restless, constantly looking for something to amuse us. We are the most frantic generation in history—and also the most entertained. The Bible tells us that both extremes are wrong.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
God gives us a glimpse of what heaven will be like for the believer. It will have the characteristics of a happy home, a holy city, a glorious garden, and a beautiful bride. This staggers the imagination!
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Sea-foam And coral! Oh, I'll Climb the great pasture rocks And dream me mermaid in the sun's Gold flood.
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
Poetry can take you places that were once only traveled by your imagination.
— Delano Johnson, Rare Images of Love
An imaginary friend once asked me why Americans can't stand Russia. The answer was cold, deadly, silent, and, well expected. It’s because in Soviet Russia nothing happens anymore, because it doesn’t exist anymore. And Americans are all about happenings. If there isn’t one – they don’t go where it isn’t, because there isn’t anything to happen to them there.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
The art wouldn’t complain if we leave her alone. Losing a touch with art, however, is losing a touch with our imagination.
— Pawan Mishra
Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
I'm selling Jarod's life today. I mean virginity. He has no life. Email admin@allthegoodonesarealreadytaken.com for more information and please try to catch our special delivery at double-price deals, which will be posted somewhere on the internet at random, every other Tuesday, for half a night (on the previous day), unless it’s a Saturday, in which case you’ll have to wait and hope until the destined day comes and takes you away to heaven, which unfortunately, does not exist, except in the imagination of carefully selected individuals.
— Will Advise
People that are scared of the dark have great imaginations and are my kind of people. Those who see nothing in the darkness are boring.
— Stewart Stafford
Much of the joy in falling in love with fictional characters comes from being able to envision new stories from them.
— The Atlantic Monthly
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.
— Davis Miller, Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts
God is concerned with our imaginations, for they in a large measure determine what kind of persons we are to be.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Jesus invited us not to a picnic, but to a pilgrimage; not to a frolic, but to a fight. He offered us not an excursion, but an execution.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
All transgressions begin with sinful thinking . . . guard against the pictures of lewdness and sensuality that Satan flashes upon the screen of your imagination, select with care the books you read, choose discerningly the kind of entertainment youattend, the kind of associates with whom you mingle, and the kind of environment in which you place yourself.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Never has there been a time when men tried so desperately to have fun as they do today.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
We have arrived at the point where we are flippant about God. We tell jokes about Him. God’s name is used so often in profanity in the entertainment world that sometimes it is embarrassing to watch television.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
We travel to see beauty of souls in new landscapes.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.
— Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Never defend yourself, but define yourself with your imagination and actions.
— Debasish Mridha M.D.
I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind's eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination
— Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then
All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.
— Nick Hornby, About a Boy
Imagination is the core of attraction.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Whatever we want, we just imagination it; the core of attraction.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.
— Jack London, To Build a Fire
How can you read this? There’s no pictures!” “Well, some people use their imagination.” – Gaston & Belle
— Walt Disney Company
Babies are the buds of imagination that are ready to bloom with lights of love and affection.
— Debasish Mridha
I have a vivid picture of what I want.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.
— A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
The most powerful forces in the universe are infinite. Love, imagination, intuition, stillness. Then why should we define our soul?
— Matthew Donnelly
Summerhill children are allowed to go through their gangster period, and consequentially more furniture is destroyed.
— A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of the human body, the very phenomenon of the human body, is intimately linked to "the problems of painting": "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these [correspondences] in turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world?" Painting brings forth a carnal visuality, an embodied and incarnate image, by establishing the internal equivalent ("in me") of the outside world, which is made of the "same stuff." I am an extension of the world, but the world extends, intensifies, forms a "line of intensity," to use Gilles Deleuze's idiom, inside me. The world forms a "strange system of exchanges" with me; I am constituted in an exchange with the world. Painting makes this continuity visible, is itself the visualization of this continuity, of this blending of the inside and out. Images—"designs" and "paintings"—says Merleau-Ponty, are "the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.
— Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light
Go where imagination takes you-- not where others have gone before.
— Debasish Mridha
We can do more than we imagine by the power of the Holy Spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.
— Stephen King
Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring
— Sue Perkins, Spectacles
They worried that fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical realities.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures--that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
Imagination is tapping into the subconscious in a form of open play. That is why art or music therapy, which encourages a person to take up brushes and paint or an instrument, and just express themselves, is so powerful.
— Phil 'Philosofree' Cheney
But they never again passed up the opportunity to read a good book, together.
— Renata Bowers, Good Dogs, Great Listeners: The Story of Charlotte, Lily and The Litter
Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.
— Austin Grossman, You
I existed in a cocoon, wrapped in daydreams. It's dangerous to be too much alone with an imagination.
— Rachel Hore, A Gathering Storm
He imagines the water running in thick curving lines, like the drawings of the tree’s roots, cutting through stone and spilling over the earth. And then he reverses the flow of water, letting his imagination take over, and he sees the water racing north, uphill, towards the Catskills, weaving around towns, beneath bridges, rushing over stones and cutting through the trees, until it lands at the feet of Alice Pearson, who stands on the shore, looking out at the place where the water meets the sky.
— Beth  Hahn, The Singing Bone
Imagination may be the most essential, uniquely human capacity - creating both the dead-end crises of our time and the doorway through them.
— Bill Plotkin
Open your eyes
—  you will see the greatness of God.
We go round and round trying to convince one another that our opinion makes more sense. And the only winner is time for making us look like fools by wasting it.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
If that's the example you want set, you be the example.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
As much as I respect him, he is somewhat of an ignorant fool.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Young lovers. If you get it right, it's amazing what you can share. The challenging part is maintaining it.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
What the future held for spirit, Emily could only imagine.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
No one knows if something works until it actually works. That's why you must always try.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Fear doesn't gain respect. It just makes people do what you want to shut you up and get you away from them.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Maybe I am just an old fool with foolish thoughts, but those foolish thoughts allow this old fool to sleep quite comfortably at night.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
What could a person like Emily do? Could she possibly satisfy both sides? Or would that only end badly?
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Embrace what works and discard what doesn't.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
You may not have finished today but the work you did got you closer than if you would have done nothing.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Don't dare try to be heroes.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Then an argument would ensue because they were men with different ideas.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
New exit, new entry!
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I wonder if life is a fairy tale!
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Imagination is the first step of creation
— Farid F. Ibrahim
Without imagination, things were only as they appeared - and that was blindness. Things were more than they appeared, so much more. When he considered an oak tree, it was not just a tree. To someone small, like an ant, it was a whole landscape of rugged barky cliffs and big green leaf-plains that quaked when the sky was restless, a place of many strange creatures where fearsome winged beasts could pluck and devour someone in a blink.
— Jonathan Renshaw, Dawn of Wonder
Imagination is a pleasant phenomenon.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
If you do not write the thoughts of the moments, it is lost forever.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Dwell on the beautiful miracles of life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse....
— Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job
It was nice meeting you three, and I'm sure under different circumstances it would have been a pleasure.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
You've got to try and not let it keep you down. Sure, let it hurt but don't let it harm you.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him...
— Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job
If there weren’t so many interesting conversations taking place inside my head, I might venture to speak out loud.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Sometimes imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.
— Michelle Cuevas, Confessions of an Imaginary Friend
Words are life. We are our words. Choose your words carefully.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
The power of writing is phenomenal.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
You can't fly by staring at the sky. You have to take a risk to grow wings of imagination and fly.
— Debasish Mridha
Having a large world of his own in his own head and heart, he tolerated confinement to a small, still corner of the real world very patiently.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
We write to embrace the sacred thoughts.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I always strive to create a setting that leaves the readers' imagination room to roam. That way, every reader sees the story through their own eyes.
— P.S. Bartlett
We talk a lot about the five senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. I would add one more…imagination.
— Wes Adamson
I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I'm telling strange tales.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix
The thousand stars that shine in the light of day
— Osman Welela, Lights In The Rain
I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Too many questions can cripple imagination, for how can you apply logical questions to something that is not real?
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Could crushed spirit be destroyed if it encountered too much spirit?
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
The sisterhood of librarians is a non-profit organisation and our goal is to keep imagination alive, not make money.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Tales of triumph are my favourite.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
One shot is all anyone needs if they back themselves and do it right.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Someone who was just nice didn't remain on your mind an hour after they'd left.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.
— W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe
It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
If you ever expect to write fairytales, you've got to get your head in the clouds.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.
— Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites
Isn't the smell of coffee the best alarm clock?
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
The power of fiction is a great thing. But, after all, reality is just a little more important.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
I do not steal imagination. I use it and replace it by making people read.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
We must stop this unimaginable atrocity before it becomes a reality.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
There is so much we do not know about the imagination. That is why we must study it.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
I believe the uncertain times are almost upon us, and they are much more uncertain than I imagined.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Manufactured spirit is much more reliable than organic spirit.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
The imagination gland doesn't die. It just becomes reliant on manufactured spirit.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
My pragmatic nature, my impatience, will most likely have me drunk on aged spirit by noon.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
It's okay, Ms Rainn, you were simply lost in your imagination.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
There were tough thoughts battling one another inside his head for the right to become reality.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Between giant spiders and meeting Edmund Ellis did I have a chance, Ms Rainn?
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Through her eyes the day was new and anything was possible.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Do you know what the best and worst thing about a book is? The author can't answer all your questions, only your imagination can.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Crying will achieve nothing. Only action will.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
There was a moment of silence as they imagined a future in which there existed an organisation that stole imagination for, undoubtedly, a sinister plan.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Too much thought can find fault in anything, even if there is no fault to be found.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
It is important to take the seriousness out of things that do not deserve it. Take the seriousness out of it, and the thing loses its power.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
How do you crush spirit? You take out all the good.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
The magic of reading happens when an author’s written work strings you along until your imagination, aware of your wants, molds the tale into an extraordinary world to be visited frequently—perhaps dwelt in for years.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
If you don't dream, then you don't really sleep.
— Joshua Suya Pelicano
You need two things to write a great book: imagination and inclination. Without one, your book will be boring; without the other, your book won't get finished at all.
— Ellie Firestone
And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
All writers read, Ms Rainn. With dwindling amounts of books circulating imagination, the less writers of all mediums will be able to exercise their own imaginations.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
You can't lose sleep over should-of's and could-of's.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…
— Italo Calvino
You must learn not to rely so heavily on others. Only then will help come when you truly need it.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
This didn't sound good. It sounded like the optimism was escaping from him.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
A cup of tea at the ready and a jug of water will suffice just fine.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
They're a group called The Spirit-crushers and their leader is known as The Almighty Spirit-crusher.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Ms Rainn, you might say, is a writing prodigy and I'm her mentor.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
The memory will most likely come to me when I least expect it. When I'm in the middle of something else.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
We each have a little imagination in all of us, and a book is the best absorbent there is.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
The world is small. Books make it bigger.
— Jerry J.C. Veit
I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.
— Zelda Fitzgerald
What is dollar value but something to amuse people who have no imagination? People who have money and no imagination follow fashion. People who have imagination and no money fashion styles.
— Elizabeth Lowell, The Secret Sister
Sometimes one's imagination can be more beautiful than the most picturesque beach.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Because it's so difficult to fight what you cannot control and right now I can't even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark.
— Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me