#imagination

It is hard for one who has not had a similar experience to imagine the terror that still gripped Taeko and Mrs. Tamaki and Hiroshi, so intense a terror that afterwards it seemed almost funny. ↗

— Junichiro Tanizaki

#life #pain #terror #imagination

I miss talking to you.' 'I can't imagine why. We haven't talked about anything particularly interesting in years.' 'I thought it was interesting. Perhaps I like talking about boring things with you. ↗

— Eloisa James

#imagination

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. ↗

— Dr. Seuss

#brain #brain cells #cells #enables #end

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #death-penalty #death-sentence #electric-chair #execution

The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence. ↗

— Eddie Rickenbacker

#character #cornerstones #four #imagination #independence

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic. ↗

— Ann-Marie MacDonald

#imagination #magic #reading #change

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. ↗

— George Alec Effinger

#science-fiction #space #space-exploration #space-program #space-travel

When we are born, we emerge into this world with new eyes and a spirit of wonder. Everything is a marvel to us. What would life be like if we retained that spirit of wonder? I can only imagine. A world such as this would not revolve around any misguided sense of self. Rather, it would be a world of infinite discovery. The wonder of life would remain forever. ↗

— Cassandra Blizzard

#inspirational #imagination

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water. ↗

— Barbara Hurd

#change #imagination #life #light #mind

I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#philosophy #simplicity #imagination