#magi

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#imagination

Imagine a person who comes in here tonight and argues 'no air exists' but continues to breathe air while he argues. Now intellectually, atheists continue to breathe - they continue to use reason and draw scientific conclusions [which assumes an orderly universe], to make moral judgments [which assumes absolute values] - but the atheistic view of things would in theory make such 'breathing' impossible. They are breathing God's air all the time they are arguing against him. ↗

— Greg L. Bahnsen

#imagination

Every lineament of the girl's wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there's something ironic in her compassion for the other girl, but she can't help feeling that this utter mortification of the flesh is far worse than anything that she herself has done. ↗

— Julia Hoban

#depression #eating-disorder #mental-illness #self-harm #self-injury

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64) ↗

— Robert Frost

#poetry #science #imagination

For surely as each November has its April, mysteries only are significant; and one mystery-of-mysteries creates them all: nothing false and possible is love (who's imagined,therefore limitless) love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if,love is to yes ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#mystery #transcendence #imagination

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you. ↗

— John Banville

#languor #longing #memories #imagination

Dear Philip, I don't imagine you will ever read this. If you do, it is bacause something dreadful has happened to me. I find myself in the hands of a dangerous man. I am determined to fight him but before I do, my heart demands that I write this note to tell you that I love you. I am sending my heart to you in this letter so it will be kept safe from whatever may happen to me tonight. I don't know if you want it or not, but it has always been yours. With all my love, Marianne ↗

— Julianne Donaldson

#regency-romance #imagination

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#insightful #space-exploration #the-future #imagination

I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. ↗

— Mary Shelley

#poet #shakespeare #imagination

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be. ↗

— Patricia McCormick

#imagination