#o

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers. ↗

— Angela Y. Davis

#denial #history #memory #slavery #imagination

Love, even that love which is imagined, is sometimes all we have to get us through. ↗

— Philip Gulley

#imagination

His brothers could tease him about his height or the number of scars he was collecting on his body. He could take the joke when they said he would die having never won a fair wrestling match. But the topic of Bettin still smarted too much. He'd imagined being with her always. Now when he closed his eyes, he had trouble imagining anything else. ↗

— Shannon Hale

#imagination

I earn the magic of words by writing. I learn the myth of worlds by imagining. ↗

— Toba Beta

#magic #myth #writing #imagination

She couldn't imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn't imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for? ↗

— Tatiana de Rosnay

#imagination

McIntyre hesitated, and for a moment the tall, gray-haired man looked almost boyish. "After all this time...don't you think you could call me William?" Amy and Dan exchanged glances. As fond as they were of him, they couldn't imagine calling their lawyer by his first name. He saw the hesitation on their faces. "Will?" Amy cleared her throat. Dan fiddled with the new GPS. "How about 'Mac'?" "Mac," Dan said, trying out the name. Mr. McIntyre looked wistful. "I always wanted to be a Mac. ↗

— Jude Watson

#imagination

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn form the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. ↗

— Elizabeth Bishop

#poetry #imagination

And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#imagination

There is no small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world. ↗

— Mary Anne Radmacher

#empathy #kindness #empathy

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#imagination #writing #writing-life #imagination