#imagination

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#identity #literary-criticism #imagination

Imagination shrinks from the consequences. ↗

— Jude Morgan

#imagination #imagination

Lucretia Jane Price. A sweet name for a sweet lady that smelled of roses, spoke with a sweet drawl, and was surely made of all the sweet country things a man who hadn't eaten a good meal in a long time could imagine -- molasses, sweet peas, sweet corn, freshly churned butter. ↗

— Linda Leigh Hargrove

#fiction #imagination

sometimes the closest we get to being where we want to be is imagining we're already there ↗

— Beth Kephert

#imagination

Afterwards, sitting on my bunk, I cried. I read somewhere that when you’re a kid it’s people’s cruelty that makes you cry, then when you’re an adult it’s their kindness. I hadn’t realised until that moment how completely I’d given up any entitlement to kindness. And then when I saw Jake, so visibly strung out, looking so totally alone, the makeup felt cheap on my face, a stupid girl’s gesture. (The girl’s still in there, waist-deep in the blood and guts of the monster’s victims. There might be something out there that’ll kill the girl but if so I can’t imagine what it could be.) Are you okay? I’m fine. Are you all right? I’m fine. Weeks of waiting and then when the moment comes you trade the plainest words. The nearness of him hurt, my heart, my head, my breasts, my womb, it felt like, started the wolf trying to tear itself free. ↗

— Glen Duncan

#talulla #the-last-werewolf #imagination

Do you imagine that they're going to issue me a citation...what was your name again?" "Still Eve." "No, I'm sure it's something else. That doesn't seem right. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#eve-rosser #morganville-vampires #myrnin #rachel-caine #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

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#language #street #imagination

We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#poets #prosody #imagination

Look at a full vivid painting, and look at an empty picture. If you can immediately see an entire universe within the empty picture, and absolutely nothing in the vivid painting, clarity is your friend. If you immediately see a full vivid painting and an empty picture, and see them for what they are, slavery is your friend. ↗

— Lionel Suggs

#imagination #perception #truth #imagination