Quotes about Imagination

In reading we must become creators.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts...

The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the visionwhich includes angels and dragons and unicorns, and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a bos marked, 'Children Only.

A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught...What a teacher can do...in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.

What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

All of Madeleine's writing, fiction and nonfiction, was an example of how all narrative is fiction, and all fiction can be true.

We must not take from our children—or ourselves—the truth that is in the world of the imagination.

Cecily moved her lips slowly, "Now I lay me," and "Our Father," and "God bless." And then, defiantly, "Dear balloon man, please dear balloon man, Father says you know God personally, and maybe he wouldn't hear me because I'm not very big or important, so would you please make Mother get well and come home and sing me the song about the king of the cannibal islands?