Janet Fitch

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought me from there to here. Should I regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if I could uncouple them? Do I regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine."

Janet Fitch

Imagination

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

Orison Swett Marden

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

Joseph Addison

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Jessamyn West

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.

Peter Nivio Zarlenga

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

Duane Michals

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

Theodor Geisel

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

Calvin Trillin

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Pablo Picasso

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Michelangelo

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

George S. Patton

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Simone Weil

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

L. Frank Baum

Imagination rules the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sagan

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Paul Gauguin

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Lewis Carroll

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Stephen Covey

Stephenie Meyer

"I couldn't let you walk away from me. It hurts just to imagine it."

Stephenie Meyer

Anne Lamott

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."

Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."

Anne Lamott

Carl Sagan

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

C.S. Lewis

"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."

C.S. Lewis

Joanne Harris

"Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored."

Joanne Harris