Angels in America - Quotes

 Harper Pitt:
I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before, and I don't think I did, then I don't think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind which is where hallucinations come from shouldn't be able to make anything up that wasn't there to start with that didn't enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. Am I making sense right now?
Prior Walter:
Given the circumstances, yes.
Harper Pitt:
So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.
 

Tags: Imagination Quotes   Nations Quotes   Appearance Quotes   Art Quotes   Experience Quotes     


Ian McEwan - Quotes

 The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.  

Tags: daydreaming   dreams   fantasy   imagination   life     
Slam - Quotes

 Ray Joshua:
The wind is the moon's imagination wandering. It seeps through cracks, ripples the grass, explores the unknown. My love is my soul's imagination. How do I love you? Imagine.
 

Tags: Love Quotes   Imagination Quotes   Love Quotes     


William Shakespeare - Quotes

 Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

 

Tags: fantasy   imagination   lovers   madmen   reason     
Brian Andreas - Quotes

 There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away. 

Tags: imagination   pirates     
Le scaphandre et le papillon - Quotes

 Jean-Dominique Bauby:
I decided to stop pitying myself. Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.
 

Tags: Imagination Quotes     
Oscar Wilde - Quotes

 Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. 

Tags: dreaming   dreams   imagination     
Gloria Steinem - Quotes

 Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning. 

Tags: dreaming   dreams   excitement   imagination   inspirational   planning   possibility     
Constantin Brancusi - Quotes

 When we are no longer children we are already dead 

Tags: children   fantastic   fantasy   imagination     
John Lennon - Quotes

 Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. 

Tags: beatles   imagination   reality     
Six Degrees of Separation - Quotes

 Paul:
It is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves - that's the hard thing. The imagination - that's God's gift, to make the act of self-examination bearable.
 

Tags: Act Quotes   Imagination Quotes   Self Quotes   Examination Quotes     
Salman Rushdie - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: allusion   creation   imagination     
King of California - Quotes

 Miranda:
You want to know how California got it's name? It's not named after some explorer, or king. Nope. Someone made the name up - a writer. He just pulled it out of his imagination in the 16th century, in Spain. He made up this place where there was unlimited gold, and pearls, and beautiful fierce women who wore gold armor, and rode wild beasts. And he called it California. It's true. It was a best seller back then. Charlie told me that. He said I could like it up if I didn't believe him. But I didn't need to.
 

Tags: Women Quotes   Men Quotes   Imagination Quotes   Men Quotes   Gold Quotes     
Michel Foucault - Quotes

 The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library. 

Tags: books   fantastic   fantasy   imagination   reading     
Hope Floats - Quotes

 Bernice Pruitt:
[Bernice and Birdee are in Bernice's room after Bill has left... Bernice is on her bed and has finished crying] Why did you pretend that letter was from Daddy?
Birdee Pruitt:
What an imagination you have. [climbs onto Bernice's bed and lays by her side]
Birdee Pruitt:
You know, I always thought I was gonna be, I don't know, special. But I'm not. I'm just... I'm just an ordinary person. And that's OK. Because... you make me special. Don't you know that? Don't you know that you're everything in this world to me? And we're gonna make it through this because we are a team. Birdee and Bernice, the coolest chicks in Smithville. So don't you ever think about leaving me again... because I need you. I love you.
Bernice Pruitt:
[quietly] I love you too.
Birdee Pruitt:
Good. [they embrace]
 

Tags: Love Quotes   Bed Quotes   Imagination Quotes   Love Quotes   Thought Quotes     
Terence McKenna - Quotes

 The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.



It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.



At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.

But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward. 

Tags: chaos   community   creative   fisherman   human   imagination   journey   metaphor   ocean     
Stephen King - Quotes

 Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet... 

Tags: destruction   folly   imagination     
Pablo Picasso - Quotes

 Everything you can imagine is real. 

Tags: imagination   inspirational   life     
Oscar Wilde - Quotes

 Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination... It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood 

Tags: crime   imagination     
Walt Disney - Quotes

 Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world. 

Tags: disneyland   imagination   world     
Sidney Sheldon - Quotes

 A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God. 

Tags: creation   imagination   writing     
The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Quotes

 
[first lines]
Narrator:
August 18, 1973. News of a bizarre, chainsaw wielding family - reports which were to ignite the world's imagination - began to filter out of central Texas. Regrettably not one of the family members was ever apprehended and for more than ten years nothing further was heard. Then, over the next several years at least two minor, yet apparently related incidents, were reported. Then again nothing. For five long years silence...
 

Tags: Family Quotes   Imagination Quotes   News Quotes     
Oscar Wilde - Quotes

 Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. 

Tags: imagination   life   money     
Finding Neverland - Quotes

 J.M. Barrie:
[gives him a journal] Here you go.
Peter Llewelyn Davies:
What's this?
J.M. Barrie:
All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title. Open it.
Peter Llewelyn Davies:
[reads] "The Boy Castaways: Being a record of the terrible adventures of the brothers Davies, faithfully set forth by Peter Llewelyn Davies."
J.M. Barrie:
Kipling would swallow his own ear for a title like that!
Peter Llewelyn Davies:
I still have no idea what to write.
J.M. Barrie:
Write about anything. Write about your family, write about the talking whale!
Peter Llewelyn Davies:
What whale?
J.M. Barrie:
The one that's trapped in your imagination and desperate to get out.
 

Tags: Imagination Quotes   Talking Quotes   Brothers Quotes   Writers Quotes     
Michael Chabon - Quotes

 Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life. 

Tags: creation   imagination     
Cormac McCarthy - Quotes

 There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. 

Tags: ecology   imagination   story   tale   world     
Oscar Wilde - Quotes

 The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. 

Tags: action   dreams   hopeless   imagination     
Sleepwalkers - Quotes

 Captain Soames:
Look, you got one hysterical girl with a very vivid imagination and all that girl needs is a good smack on the butt and her mommy and daddy won't do it, I'll be happy to volunteer.
 

Tags: Imagination Quotes   Needs Quotes     
Mervyn Peake - Quotes

 As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean. 

Tags: fish   imagination   life     
Alfred de Musset - Quotes

 Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are! 

Tags: conformity   imagination   mankind     
Al Sharpton - Quotes

 Because, 

Tags: believe   imagination   inspirational   life     
Lynda Barry - Quotes

 There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.



I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.



They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable. 

Tags: imagination   sensitive     
Dorothy Thompson - Quotes

 Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism. 

Tags: energy   faith   imagination   justice   love   peace   strength   sympathy   will     
Style & Substance - Quotes

 Chelsea:
"The Steakhouse." Well, we can only hope the imagination saved coming up with the name is being put to good use in the kitchen!
 

Tags: Imagination Quotes   Hope Quotes     
Alan Moore - Quotes

 Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing. 

Tags: consciousness   imagination     
Guy Davenport - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: geography   imagination   language     
Terry Pratchett - Quotes

 Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one. 

Tags: fantasy   humor   imagination   literature   stories     
Salvador Plascencia - Quotes

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

Tags: creation   imagination   story     
Shel Silverstein - Quotes

 If you are a dreamer come in

If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar

A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer

If youre a pretender com sit by my fire

For we have some flax golden tales to spin

Come in!

Come in! 

Tags: dreamer   imagination   liar   poetry   wisher   wishes     
Anne Lamott - Quotes

 You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be. 

Tags: imagination   writer   writers   writing     
Marge Piercy - Quotes

 We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves. 

Tags: imagination   utopia     
Betty Smith - Quotes

 Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. 

Tags: belief   imagination   ugliness     
Raymond Chandler - Quotes

 A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong. 

Tags: hyperbole   imagination     
Paulo Coelho - Quotes

 Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives. 

Tags: childhood   imagination     
Frederick Buechner - Quotes

 If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. 

Tags: empathy   imagination   love   understanding     
Alexandre Dumas - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: imagination   writer     
Raymond Queneau - Quotes

 He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination. 

Tags: adventure   boring   imagination     
Emily Dickinson - Quotes

 The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination. 

Tags: imagination   possibility     
William Carlos Williams - Quotes

 Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses. 

Tags: imagination     
Bill Hicks - Quotes

 Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye. 

Tags: imagination   intuition   television     
Toba Beta - Quotes

 There's no heaven as I had known before.

It's just a great universe which is available

to be enjoyed by souls who dream about it. 

Tags: available   dream   dreams   heaven   imagination   imagine   life   secret   soul     
Ken Kesey - Quotes

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

Tags: imagination   observation     
Francis Bacon - Quotes

 Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. 

Tags: humor   imagination     
Kurt Vonnegut - Quotes

 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. 

Tags: action   attitude   choice   imagination   inspiration   life   pretend     
Pierre Janet - Quotes

 Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.

 

Tags: ideas   imagination   literature   mind   surrealism   writing     
Alan Moore - Quotes

 The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.

Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis:  

Tags: consciousness   imagination   language     
Mark Helprin - Quotes

 Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves. 

Tags: certainty   cities   imagination   justice   mankind     
Sherman Alexie - Quotes

 Poetry = Anger x Imagination 

Tags: anger   imagination   poetry     
Michael Richardson - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: imagination   peret   stories   surrealism     
Terence McKenna - Quotes

 It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us. 

Tags: divine   human   imagination   soul   world     


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