c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
He's like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
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, The Stone Raft
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, Prince of Fools
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, Prince of Fools
The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
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, The Sketch Book
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, The Magician
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, Envy
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, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
In the world of imagination, all things belong.
— Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
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, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days
Ideas that don't even exist have the power to destroy the world.
— Lionel Suggs
The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
We live in the world we made up.
— Jim Paul, Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
To me, imagination is about breaking down the walls of a reality of multiple interpretations, and truly opening up your mind to assemble one clear interpretation. Once you have tasted imagination, reality will no longer be enough for you. The line between reality and dreams will become blurred, and then clear, because the line will cease to exist. Once you reach the point of living in imagination, you will truly be free.
— Lionel Suggs
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, Daddy-Long-Legs
You are...beyond my imagination. It's a wonder you can be touched at all.
— Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You
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, The Dragonbone Chair
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, After the Quake
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, Selected Poems
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, The Black Tulip
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, The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories
The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.
— Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity
—  and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.
This is a place of true imagination.
— Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
— Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
We live in condensations of our imagination
— Terence McKenna
They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.
— Jean Toomer
To see things as they really were--what an empoverishment!
— L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
We dream — it is good we are dreaming —It would hurt us — were we awake —But since it is playing — kill us,And we are playing — shriek —What harm? Men die — externally —It is a truth — of Blood —But we — are dying in Drama —And Drama — is never dead —Cautious — We jar each other —And either — open the eyes —Lest the Phantasm — prove the Mistake —And the livid SurpriseCool us to Shafts of Granite —With just an Age — and Name —And perhaps a phrase in Egyptian —It's prudenter — to dream —
— Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems
We _are_ rich,' said Anne staunchly. 'Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we are as happy as queens and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls - all silver and shallow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.
— Lynda Barry, What It Is
I love when truth is stranger than fiction. It authenticates my wild imagination.
— Joseph DiFrancesco
Beyond your wildest imagination, there is something worth working for.
— Gordon Attard
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
— Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true-the joy of anticipating is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.
— Maria Augusta von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
— Arundhati Roy
He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination.
— Raymond Queneau
Does progress mean that we dissolve our ancient myths? If we forget our legends, I fear that we shall close an important door to the imagination
— James Christensen
Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.
— Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.
— Terence McKenna
The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.
— Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
Our imagination is dictated by who we are. (198)
— Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night
If you can imagine a thing,then it has already existed,somewhere, somewhen, somehow.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
If you start most of your sentences with 'Why Can't', 'Why Not', or 'What if', you'll build a stronger imagination.
— Corey Aaron Burkes, Scratch - with Audio Theater and Links
If-Then" is a structured logic of humans' thought,who have memories and imagination in their mind. If both don't exist, Then this quote has never even been written.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
People are made in such a way that if something inexplicable happens to them, they write it off to an overheated imagination.
— Max Frei, The Stranger
He who lacks imagination lives but half a life. He has his experiences, he has his facts, he has his learning. But do any of these really live unless touched by the magic of the imagination?
— Paul Fenimore Cooper
The alarming lack of ideas that is recognizable in all acts of culture, politics, organization of life, and the rest is explained by this, and the weakness of the modernist constructers of functionalist cities is only a particularly visible example of it. Intelligent specialists only ever have the intelligence to play the game of specialists: hence the fearful conformity and fundamental lack of imagination that make them admit that this or that product is useful, good, necessary. In fact, the root of the reigning lack of imagination cannot be understood if one does not have access to the imagination of lack--that is to conceiving what is absent, forbidden, and hidden, and yet possible, in modern life.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Imagination is God's gift to the dreamers.
— T.R. Wallace
Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I’m lying down and horizontally if I’m running
— Steve Aylett
Usually, the main problem with life conundrums is that we don't bring to them enough imagination
— Thomas   Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
We believe in an aristocracy... Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank or wealth, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Our members are found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between us when we meet... We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We're an invincible army, but not a victorious one. We've had different names throughout history, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now we're called V.F.D., but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won't matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.
— Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?
Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.
— Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
Lead's erasing then vanishingBanished from whatever it is they're drinking and it's cleanedRunning from the pitcher as if it's her fantasy
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
Our imagination goes ahead of us, bringing our yesterday's imagings into present realities.
— Ogwo David Emenike
To imagine is to risk being mentally blind.
— Ogwo David Emenike
WRITER'S NIGHTMARE""I felt a grip on my arm that shook my body, forcefully pulling me toward a tunnel of darkness.   The threat of consciousness stole my steady breath. For a moment I believed myself to be under siege; ripped from the sky in mid flight, my wings useless against the monstrous claws shredding my reality. I struggled to remain, to be left alone, aloft.  Reaching with wings that through the power of imagination were suddenly feathered arms, I grabbed at the air.  My hands clutched at something solid.  Wooden.  A desk.  My head spun as I held the furniture, suffering the illusion of falling.  "I was flying," I gasped, realizing suddenly that it had all been a dream. "My best fantasy ever." Lifting my head from its resting spot on the writing desk, I worked mentally to secure the fading images, hoping to capture their essence to memory before they faded away forever.  Bitterness tainted my heart against the hand that had jerked me into sensibility.  Why was I always so callously awakened while doing my best work?  Why not let me dream?
— Richelle E. Goodrich
People tend to misinterpret imagination for being willing to do everything, instead of having the capability to put your mind to anything. There is a difference.
— Lionel Suggs
I fake fake to have a fake life. Does that make me a real horse? Buy now for $777, wooden saddle sold separately. Real horseshoes not included. Imaginary ones – neither.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
— Algernon Blackwood, The Willows
Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
— Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son
Sympathy is the child of imagination
— Clarence Darrow
The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
— Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sheridaniana: Or, Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
— Jacob Bronowski
Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
Possibility, or what we refer to as imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%. The problem is, this 1% is simultaneously referred to as Evil.
— Kouhei Kadono, Boogiepop Returns: Vs. Imaginator Part 1
There are two gods in this universe: God and Imagination. Both of them can design and create infinite creations.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For the record, I'm not an indecisive person, and I'm not a coward. I just have a very detailed imaginary life, and it sometimes takes precedence over what's actually happening around me.
— Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can’t think why or where she would run to.
— Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow
Without imagination we should be lost; for only with its help can we interpret our experience, turn it into experience of an outer world, and thus make use of it in understanding what and where we are, and what we need to do.
— Mary Warnock, Imagination and Time
A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.
— Gabriel García Márquez, In Evil Hour
It was what she imagined doing heroin would be like: terrible for you but impossible to resist.
— Libby Schmais, The Essential Charlotte
The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.
— Enoch Powell
Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer.
— Robert S. Hichens, the Return of the Soul and Other Stories
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs
— Gertrude Atherton, The Bell in the Fog & Other Stories
One kind of walking which I do not recall seeing mentioned anywhere in the literature of the subject is imaginary walking.
— Edwin V. Mitchell, The Pleasures Of Walking
If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?
— Cathleen Schine, She Is Me
Now that we've come up with all the obvious answers to our problem, it's time to come up with some truly ridiculous ones.""Ridiculous?" asked Brasque."Yes, ridiculous. Think of something impossible, improbable or downright ridiculous and go from there.""Like we all flap our arms and fly out of here," said Katherine."Exactly!" said Spider."How about we form a long line all the way to the mountains and pass the charges along it?" said Brasque."Excellent," said Spider. "Keep it coming.""What if we each carry one charge, run back, carry another, and so on?" said Tom, getting into the swing of things."Lovely!" laughed Spider. "Now we're cooking."The shower of sparks shot out of the top of the Amadragon. Joe shielded his eyes with his hand."Yeah, and we can all climb on the Amadragon and ride out of here," he said."What was that, Joe?" said Spider, suddenly dropping the jokey manner. "What's the Amadragon?"Katherine's eyes glittered. "He means that," she said, pointing at the excavator. Everyone except Spider turned and looked. "He's talking about the giant machine, the one that keeps shooting sparks in the air."Spider cocked his ear and listened to the rumble of the Amadragon's engine. "So Orlemann built the dragon, did he?" he said. "I'd been wondering what the noise was. If they built it to the original specifications, it should get us out of here within an hour. Let's pray that will give us enough time!
— Carol Hughes, Dirty Magic
As Peret asserts, the value of such stories resides in the fact that they respond to direct social necessity but in a way that is not obvious in a society dominated by what is utilitarian and functional. Rather they represent a natural surplus of imaginative abundance that may confound or reinforce the way we perceive the world, but which never does so in a simple way. Even though they may have no direct social use, they nonetheless embody the actual state of real relations between people.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
(She) didn't believe in resilience. She believed in imagination.
— Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder
The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.
— Marcel Proust, The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
Imagination is the wonder of the wise.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.
— Donna Tartt, The Little Friend
A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.
— Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.
— Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
See that house with the Ivy on it? From that rooftop, what if you leapt onto the next rooftop, dashed over that blue & green wall, climbed and jumped up the pipe, ran across the roof and jumped to the next? You can, in animation.If you could walk along the cable, you could see the other side. When you look from above, so many things reveal themselves to you. Maybe race along the concrete wall. Suddenly, there in your humdrum town there is a magical movie. Isn’t it fun to see things that way? Feels like you could go somewhere far beyond……maybe you can…
— Hayao Miyazaki
. . . a wind howling began, which seemed to form all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
For a young man has strong imagination but poor judgment, so that he imagines others to be as big as he is but considers himself to be very small. He has unbounded trust in the universe but is constantly unsure of himself.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
My father knew our way mile by mile; by day or by night, he knew where we were. Everything that changed under our eyes, in the flying countryside, was the known world to him, the imagination to me. Each in our own way, we hungered for all this: my father and I were in no other respect or situation so congenial.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
Imagination is the connecting of disparate things in novel ways.
— R.A.Delmonico
Man came first through evolution. God came second through man's imagination.
— Joey Lawsin, In the beginning, Man Created God
Imagination is probably the most remarkable thing that exist in the universe.
— R.A.Delmonico
The unconscious mind goes on doing things and creating problems. There is no wall at all that you have to push through. The real thing is that you want to push, you are in a hurry. And because you want to push, you have to imagine a wall. It is your imagination. Just try to laugh at your imagination, at your hurry, because this is not the way meditation happens. Laugh, relax, and just be in the moment – watching whatever is going on, outside or inside, in the world or in the mind. You are neither the world nor the mind. You are behind all, just a pure watching consciousness.
— Osho, Watch and Wait: relaxing and waking up - instinct and intuition
My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Here in Alpha City, we have a common saying: “What we call ‘sky’ is merely a figment of our narrative.” The most dreamy-eyed among us seem to adorn themselves and their aspirations in that proverb and you’ll see it everywhere: in advertisements on the sides of streetcars and auto-rickshaws, spelled out in studs and rhinestones on designer jackets, emblazoned in the intricate designs of facial tattoos—even painted on city walls by putrid vandals and inspiring street artists. There is something glorious about kneading out into the doughy firmament the depth and breadth of one’s own universe, in rendering the contours of a sky whose limits are predicated only upon the bounds of one’s own imagination. The fact of the matter is that we cannot see the natural sky at all here. It is something like a theoretical mathematical expression: like the square-root of ‘negative one’—certainly it could be said to have a purpose for existing, but to cast eyes upon it, in its natural quantity, would be something akin to casting one’s eyes upon the raw elements comprising our everyday sustenance. How many of us have even borne close witness to the minute chemical compounds that react to lend battery power to our portable electronics? The sky is indeed such a concealed fixture now. It is fair to say that we have purged our memories of its true face and so we can only approximate a canvas and project our desires upon it to our heart’s dearest fancy. The most cynical among us would ostensibly declare it an unavoidable tragedy, but perhaps even these hardened individuals could not remember the naked sky well enough to know if what they were missing was something worthwhile. Perhaps, it’s cynical of me to say so! In any case, we have our searchlights pointed upwards and crisscrossing that expanse of heavens as though to make some sensational and profane joke of ourselves to the surrounding universe. We beam already video images of beauty pageants and dancing contests with smiling mannequins who look like buffoons. And so, the face of space cloaks itself behind our light pollution—in this respect, our mirrored sidewalks and lustrous streets do little to help our cause—and that face remains hidden from us in its jeering ridicule, its mocking laughter at this inexorable farce of human existence.
— Ashim Shanker
This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.
— Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
In a suspended psychic state, writers cull words and symbols from the mystical world of memory, imagination, and intuition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Too much reason limits man to the physical world and blinds his imagination to the greater things that may be. But too much faith blinds him from curing the human suffering in this world. Men with too much faith accept suffering
—  they expect it and even seek it out.
I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.
— Alan Bradley, Speaking from Among the Bones
She opened her eyes slowly and saw that a pale lavender moth had come to a rest on the back of her hand. She watched it from her pillow, wondering if it was real. It reminded her of her husband Matt's favorite T-shirt, which she'd hidden in a bag of sewing, unable to throw it away. It had a large faded moth on the front, the logo of a cover band out of Athens called the Mothballs.That T-shirt, that moth, always brought back a strange memory of when she was a child. She used to draw tattoos of butterflies on her arms with Magic Markers. She would give them names, talk to them, carefully fill in their colors when they started to fade. When the time came that they wanted to be set free, she would blow on them and they would come to life, peeling away from her skin and flying away.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
My favorite words in the world are t
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
What if stars were the glimmering tears of a giant, welling in his cheeks, waiting to fall at the first tender stroke of emotion? What if the moon were a wide-open eye gazing down on our tiny, little world and its tiny, little inhabitants as they rush to and fro in pursuit of tiny, little dreams? What if the sun were the glowing heart of a great beast, pumping hot blood to keep him alive while providing warmth for our pitiful world? Ahhh, imagination; it is a wondrous thing!
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
An inexhaustible imagination is the fountain of youth.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
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, A Plea for Eros: Essays
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, A Plea for Eros: Essays
No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
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, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God
Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
— Mary Oliver
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, I've Been Around
We both knew no bounds to our escapism.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
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, In This Grave Hour
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, Reading Lolita in Tehran
You should only be scared of your imagination because it'll haunt you at night
— Paula Acedo
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, Ficciones
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, The Zookeeper's Wife
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
— Catherine the Great, The Memoirs of Catherine the Great
While looking into the mirror, you are saying to yourself: I am the best. Your own reflection makes you forget the only presence in the mirror.
— Viorica Dragotel
There are never any rules, rights, or wrongs in imagining--- imagining just is.
— Pamela Zagarenski, The Whisper
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, Empire of Signs
Imagination is by definition, a complex system.
— R.A.Delmonico
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, Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future
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, The Blindfold
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, Dubhán Reborn
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, A Midsummer Night's Dream
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, Amy Snow
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, Dead Toad Scrolls
I guess ice cream is one of those things that are beyond imagination
— L.M. Montgomery
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, The Power and the Glory
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, Violades & Appledown
So much of love is imagination -- its over-activity, its over-ambition, its over-the-top faith.
— Gerry LaFemina, Little Heretic
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 Stared at the Night of the City
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, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
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, I Stared at the Night of the City
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, What is Mind?
If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.'(from "The Front and the Back Parts of the House", 1991)
— William Maxwell, All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Exactly," Jesus interrupted. "You imagine. Such a powerful ability, the imagination! That power alone makes you so like us. But without wisdom, imagination is a cruel task-master.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
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, The Cocktail Party
How a plain and wagon on Mulberry Street, Grows into a story that no one can beat
— Dr. Seuss, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street
How a Plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street, Grows into a story Thet no one can beat
— Dr. Seuss, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street