Imaginary Quotes - Page 19

• ...after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.

  Chris Marker

  Country, Taken, Maps

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• All you have is the writer's imagination. You have a very limited time to take this imaginary person and bring the details of their life, as you perceive them, to life. You attempt to do to that as fully and as vibrantly as you can. It's depressing to read how much you've failed. And it's not even particularly instructive or necessary to read how you succeeded because in the end don't you have to judge that?

  John Malkovich

  Depressing, Imagination, Judging

  "New Again: John Malkovich". Interview with Becky Johnston, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 10, 2015.

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• The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.

  David Byrne

  Thinking, Balance, Trying

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, pitchfork.com. July 17, 2006.

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• I think the written word is my first love. I was just a very imagination - centered child and a big part of that imaginary life came from reading.

  Zoe Kazan

  Children, Reading, First Love

  Source: collider.com

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• Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

  John Berger

  Stars, Night, Sky

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.8, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended...The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Children, Real, Medicine

  "Tales and Novels". Book by Maria Edgeworth, vol. 14, p. 245, 1843.

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• Now every idiot from high school's like, 'I'm back!' We weren't supposed to meet again. Stop poking me and inviting me to your weird vampire parties. No, I don't want to follow you on Twatter. Like, nobody's interested in you. I don't want to see you in real life, why would I want to follow you in the imaginary one?

  Amy Schumer

  Real, Party, School

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• I was such a nerd in high school, I didn't even have imaginary friends, I had imaginary bullies.

  Brian Posehn

  School, Bully, Nerd

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• Today's imaginary band name: The Significan't.

  Janina Gavankar

  Names, Band, Today

  FaceBook post by Janina Gavankar from Sep 29, 2013

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• Childhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own...I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world.

  Loretta Lux

  Children, Garden, Self

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• God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, ... are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

  Martin Luther

  Strong, Justice, Heaven

  "Let Your Sins Be Strong". A Letter From Luther to Melanchthon, Letter no. 99, AUgust 1, 1521.

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• You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Self, Female

  Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

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• How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.

  Lyman Abbott

  Children, Mean, Appreciate

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• Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small, that it scarcely admits of calculation. Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable.

  David Hume

  Real, Passion, Government

  'Essays' (1741-2) 'Of Civil Liberty'

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• In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.

  Terry Eagleton

  Self, Ego, Would Be

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.147, John Wiley & Sons

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• Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.

  Bell Hooks

  Men, Space, Feminist

  bell hooks (2012). “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, p.95, Routledge

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• Divisions are imaginary lines drawn by small minds.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Mind, Division, Lines

  Yogananda (Paramahansa) (1969). “Self-realization Magazine”

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• An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.

  William J. Mitchell

  Dream, Wall, Plato

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• I think that in the colonial imaginary of the average Mexican, in how it drives us, the economic dependence on the US, and in some cases cultural dependence, is quite palpable, very strong.

  Bocafloja

  Strong, Thinking, Average

  "Decolonial Rap". Interview with Andrew Smolski, www.counterpunch.org. May 15, 2015.

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• To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.

  Robert Silverberg

  Long, Enemy, Waste

  Robert Silverberg (2004). “Phases of the Moon: Stories of Six Decades”, Subterranean

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• [Cindy Sherman's] photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do.

  Douglas Crimp

  Art, Real, Self

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• Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Evil, Choices, Desire

  Benjamin Franklin, William-Temple Franklin (1818). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of (the Same), Continued to the Time of His Death by William Temple Franklin. - London, H. Colburn 1818”, p.238

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• Maybe God is an asshole...of course not, he's not an asshole, he's imaginary.

  Louis C. K.

  Courses

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• In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

  Thomas Merton

  Humility, Heart, Thinking

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.57, New Directions Publishing

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