#the

Is everyone with one face called a Milo?" "Oh no," Milo replied; "some are called Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things." "How terribly confusing," he cried. "Everything here is called exactly what it is. The triangles are called triangles, the circles are called circles, and even the same numbers have the same name. Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless." "I never thought of it that way," Milo admitted. "Then I suggest you begin at once," admonished the Dodecahedron from his admonishing face, "for here in Digitopolis everything is quite precise. ↗

— Norton Juster

#mathematics #names #equality

You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. ↗

— C. S. Lewis

#theology #art

She grabbed her briefcase and took a step toward him. “You don’t have a last name?” “Everyone has a last name.” His hand hovered in the air, waiting. He was forcing her to cross the marble floor to meet him, and like a Luna moth drawn to a midnight moon, she drifted toward him. When she reached him, she took his hand and looked up into his face. “Is it Jones? Smith? Or Brown?” His lips twitched. “None of the above.” “And you won’t tell me?” “It’s not necessary information.” She tilted her head, studying his angular features. “You don’t look like an Adrian.” His smile broadened. “Imagine that.” “More like a Carlos, or a Juan, or a Diego.” “Those are Hispanic names.” “Aren’t you Hispanic?” “I’m anything you want me to be. ↗

— Shelby Reed

#chris #shelby-reed #the-fifth-favor #imagination

Do it. Before they send those mutts back or something. I don't want to die like Cato," he says. “Then you shoot me," I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. "You shoot me and go home and live with it!" And as I say it, I know death right here, right now would be the easier of the two. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#peeta-mellark #the-hunger-games #death

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him. ↗

— Kim Edwards

#other-worlds #unknown #imagination

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#the-bell-jar #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

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

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#imagination #theory #imagination