Imagination Quotes - Page 27

• 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 Smythe Hichens

  Men, May, Lost

  Robert Smythe Hichens (1896). “The folly of Eustace: and other stories”

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• I think writers have to be able to enjoy solitude rather than just endure it. I've always enjoyed being left alone with my imagination, ever since I was a kid.

  Peter Robinson

  Kids, Thinking, Solitude

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. November 19, 2008.

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• There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dangerous, Dangerous Things, Subversive

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• I don't think it's good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future give you if you've already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you? A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.

  Joseph Heller

  Thinking, Giving, Personality

  Joseph Heller, Adam J. Sorkin (1993). “Conversations with Joseph Heller”, p.115, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

  Robert Hass

  Revenge, Military, Taken

  Robert Hass (2007). “Time and materials: poems, 1997-2005”, HarperCollins

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• Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age - Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds. No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.

  Tad Williams

  Real, Thinking, Animal

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• Nature has no outline. Imagination has.

  William Blake

  Outlines

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• The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Men, Whole

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1971). “Ringside Seats”

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• If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.

  Alister E. McGrath

  Order, Focus, Lenses

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• We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.

  David Whyte

  Pain, Distance, Taken

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• They would make the 'Church ' their great meeting-point, rather than the Atonement of Christ. As far as my experience goes, they have more devoutness and less devotion, more fear and less love, more feeling of duty than of desire, laying more stress on Phil. ii. 12 than ver. 13, and in practice working upon the intellect and imagination rather than aiming at the heart, skirmishing among the outworks rather than assaulting the citadel.

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Stress, Heart, Practice

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• Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

  Tom Shippey

  Memories, Reading, Years

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• There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But he still says so. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. But he still says so. And thus, gripping firmly these figments of his own imagination, Mr. Cheney lives on, in defiance, and spreads - around him and before him - darkness, like some contagion of fear. They are never wrong, and they never regret - admirable in a French torch singer, cataclysmic in an American leader.

  Keith Olbermann

  Regret, Iraq, Mass Destruction

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• Public image is extremely important in American society and I observed personally that the Presidency of John F. Kennedy did much in the public mind for Harvard. Harvard was an excellent school before Kennedy, but Kennedy embodied a new vision for the United States: a leader who caught the world's imagination and that reflected on his alma mater, Harvard.

  Henry Rosovsky

  School, Leader, Mind

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• The din of politicians speechifying about the war, the faux moral posturing of opinion-makers who claim to speak in the name of 'the troops,' everything that Iraq has come to represent in the American imagination - it all melts away in the 115-degree heat. What's left is the machinery of a war that, having been called into being by civilians, no longer bears a relation to anything they say.

  Lawrence Kaplan

  War, Names, Iraq

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• Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

  Camille Paglia

  Sex, Political, May

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.41, Canongate Books

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• People read a lot of stories about witches, fairies, paranormals, and children possessed by evil spirits. They go to films showing rituals featuring pentagrams, swords, and invocations. That's fine, people need to give free reign to their imagination and to go through certain stages. Anyone who gets through those stages without being deceived will eventually get in touch with the Tradition.

  Paulo Coelho

  Children, People, Evil

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• At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

  Truman Capote

  Notebook, Ideas, Stories

  Truman Capote, M. Thomas Inge (1987). “Truman Capote: Conversations”, p.30, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

  Anthony Doerr

  Book, Europe, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged.

  Henry Giroux

  Difficult Questions, Culture, Failing

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

  Karen Russell

  Growing Up, Ocean, Tree

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.

  Matthea Harvey

  Spring, Ocean, Flower

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy, and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside of our own heads.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Ambition, Past

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• Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

  Darryl Pinckney

  White, Justice, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.

  Hassan Blasim

  Thinking, Feelings, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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