Quotes about Imagination

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

If only we could eat our sunsets, I say, we would all be full.

Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

we also first beheld Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved To have a soulless image on the eye That had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be.

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

It always puzzled him, when he was a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.

Use the shadows of the born The shapes of the world And pass them before the light Of imagination's birthless ecstasy

Maybe that's a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated, said Japhy. A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles. (The Dharma Bums, Chap. 8)

To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.