#boo

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays. ↗

— John Lanchester

#exile #memory #past #reading #imagination

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past ("en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés"). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#dreams #imagination #magic #visions #writing

Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other. ↗

— Martha Cooley

#god #imagination

I want to thank anyone who spends a part of their day creating, I don't care if it's a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music - anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us - I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you. ↗

— Steven Soderbergher

#book #creating #dance #experience #film

This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating. ↗

— John Matteson

#creativity #imagination #life #people #possibility

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life. ↗

— Mark Miller

#culture #imagination

Imagination is a gift given to us from God and each one of us use it differently. ↗

— Brian Jacques

#god #imagination #imagination

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#inspirational #inspirational

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#inspirational #inspirational

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#companionship #inspirational #inspirational