Imagining Quotes

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
― Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith

“When people look at clouds they do not see their real shape, which is no shape at all, or every shape, because they are constantly changing. They see whatever it is that their heart yearns for.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion

“I earn the magic of words by writing.
I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“How do we set about not imagining something?”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“. . . she'd seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn't mere friendship, and they'd hugged, and she'd felt . . .

Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she'd imagined him saying 'come with me' and known she'd have gone if he had.”
― Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood

“C’est toujours l’imagination qui l’emporte sur la volonté, sans aucune exception.

-

It is always the imagination that wins over the will, without exception.”
― Émile Coué

“What if stars were the glimmering tears of a giant, welling in his cheeks, waiting to fall at the first tender stroke of emotion? What if the moon were a wide-open eye gazing down on our tiny, little world and its tiny, little inhabitants as they rush to and fro in pursuit of tiny, little dreams? What if the sun were the glowing heart of a great beast, pumping hot blood to keep him alive while providing warmth for our pitiful world? Ahhh, imagination; it is a wondrous thing!”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year

“Stop it. Learn to take things at face value. You're always looking for what's not there.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Birds are magical.
Their flight alone can arouse a clever thought.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“My imagination is like the sea, it is deeper than you can imagine.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“My favorite words in the world are these:
“what” and “if” in conjunction.
They question curiosities
in simple form and function.
“What” is a query of broadest scope.
“If" is wonder that fuels all hope.
Together they lasso the mind like rope, and spur the wildest deductions!”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year

“An inexhaustible imagination is the fountain of youth.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year

“Anna, are you asleep?"

He imagined Anna lying awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, her heart full of yearning, but there was only silence.

"I love you, Anna," he whispered, and he hung up the phone.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“I gobble the food down, trying to imagine that I am sitting at the table with them. Trying to imagine myself as their daughter again, and not what's left of her.

A cuckoo trying to fit back into the egg.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn't happen.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Well, I supposed all these things. It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“But now he was dreaming, he was wildly imagining things.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Image is the root of imagination.”
― Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words

“What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“--Because when you're imagining you might as well imagine something worth while--”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imaging different things for our future.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Well,' he said, 'we think you probably do.' When I imagine this scene as part of a movie, the minute of silence after my father says this is extended for an hour or so, and then the credits roll.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Some people are doing things you are imagining and some are imagining things you are doing.”
― Nitya Prakash

“Knowing is giving beliefs credibility beyond just imagining, assuming, or supporting an acquired thought learned casually from other people.”
― Steven Redhead, Life Is A Circus

“Imagination is not obligated to let practicalities dominate, nor to judge itself in terms of dualistic language (true vs untrue; reality vs fantasy; good vs evil, etc.) The paradox of imagination is that it cannot imagine itself while it is experienced and it can't judge itself while experienced.

'I promise never to imagine cutting a kittens throat' is a ridiculous proposition. Most of us wish that people would not get pleasure imagining such things to the exclusion of anything else. Even so, imagining per se leaves no traces, while planning may do so and preforming always does. Imagining leave no traces, which is not the same as saying imagining has no effect.”
― Jeanne Randolph, Ethics of Luxury: Materialism and Imagination

“There is a widely held belief that the imagination is not to be trusted and that only things scientifically real and provable can be relied on. Yet, many of your greatest scientific inventions comes from the imagination. [...] Everything in your reality existed as a thought before it existed in reality.”
― Sanaya Roman, Duane Packer, Opening to Channel: How to Connect with Your Guide

“The firelight shone upon his exposed fangs, and I wondered how they'd feel on my throat, and how loudly my sisters would scream before they, too, died.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Silence is the doorway to the temple of imagination.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts