#though

I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too. ↗

— Brian Selznick

#imagination

I could turn on my side, and she might turn on her side, too. And then we could kiss. But what's the point of kissing her now, anyway? It won't go anywhere. We are both staring at the cloudles sky. “Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will,” she says. ↗

— John Green

#margo #quentin #thoughts #imagination

Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now? ↗

— Adyashanti

#reality #thoughts #imagination

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#love #thoughts #imagination

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well. ↗

— Walter Mosley

#life #memories #thoughts #imagination

I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretence that things are real, due to one's longing for them. ↗

— Dodie Smith

#faith #god #imagination #longing #religion

Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. ↗

— Iris Murdoch

#imagination

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven. ↗

— Francis Beaumont

#companions #earth #faith #fly #heaven

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. ↗

— J.M.G. Le Clézio

#thought #imagination

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#pleasure #thought #imagination