“The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.”
― Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination


“One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.”
― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom



“The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations.”
― Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism



“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and
embroidered by imagination.”
― Volaire



“I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes


“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson



“Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
― Eugène Ionesco




“The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves




“Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.”
― Alfred Hitchcock



“An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?”
― Criss Jami




“Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch Book





“       'Tis to create, and in creating live
        A being more intense, that we endow
        With form our fancy, gaining as we give
        The life we image, even as I do now.
        What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
        Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,
        Invisible but gazing, as I glow
        Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.”
― George Gordon Byron, Selected Poems