#na

Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands. The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience. ↗

— Mark Bell

#imagination

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

The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality. ↗

— Eric Sloane

#imagination

Fake it 'till you make it. ↗

— Gayle Forman

#inspirational

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

The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community—and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion—when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged. ↗

— David Graeber

#debt #hate #love #society #temptation

Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness? ↗

— Alan Moore

#happiness #pessimism #imagination