Quotes
...she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."
There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss. Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cognition unmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings in reality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only—pathetically—a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affect to fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the complexity of human response by destroying the language that communicates its existence.
It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
“Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest.”, p. 226, 2013
Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and this many-coloured pigment of imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them doth agree with another!
Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.
p. 167
"And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. [...] It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. [...] Nothing was as real as her imagined world."
Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential.
p. 13
In dreams you are so 'dumb' that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so 'irrational' as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. You are so 'unrealistic' that it seems to you that you visit old houses, long ago torn down, or that you travel in exotic foreign cities that you have actually never visited. In dreams you are so 'insane' you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning.
p. 25
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
