#nation

He looked at me, finally. I wanted to believe I saw softness in his eyes, but I could have imagined it. I did that all the time. All I had to do was close my eyes and I could see him reaching toward me, his lips millimeters from my own. But always… always I opened my eyes and it wasn’t real. ↗

— Cora Carmack

#imagination

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#insanity #sanity #short-story #imagination

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#imagination

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#reading #imagination

The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative. Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young-man - all present still, preserved as fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died -what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But it happened so gradually, so easily. I am afraid of being rushed. ↗

— Christopher Isherwood

#living #imagination

Day lets her imagination free with an urban adventure that is not only fast-paced, but also erotic and addictive. [on Eve of Darkness ] ↗

— Sasha White

#endorsement #sj-day #imagination

The first step to success it's to imagine it ↗

— Pete Hautman

#imagination

The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, "We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction. ↗

— Humphrey Carpenter

#imagination

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o’-the-wisps of the imagination. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#sherlock-holmes #the-sign-of-four #imagination

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. ↗

— Charles Simic

#literary-theory #literature #imagination