Imagined Worlds Quotes & Sayings

I spoke at a woman's club in Philadelphia yesterday and a young lady said to me afterwards, "Well, that sounds very nice, but don't you think it is better to be the power behind the throne?" I answered that I had not had much experience with thrones, but a woman who has been on a throne, and who is now behind it, seems to prefer to be on the throne. — Anna Howard Shaw

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here. Believe in kissing. — Eve Ensler

Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine. — Adam Schiff

I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be. — Ernesto Che Guevara

On the radio I listen to the easy-listening stations, the jazz stations. — Patti Page

Tides is a rich, taut, suspenseful, and funny exploration of two worlds, selkie and human. It's full of mystery but it's also so fully imagined that a reader can jump right in. Betsy Cornwell is a terrific new talent with a boundless imagination. — Valerie Sayers

There was a new simplicity to what I did, a door that had opened before me to worlds I had not imagined. From where I sat, if you watched carefully you could marvel at it, like the impossible birth of a cottonseed or the slow rise of a wooden house: the steady construction of a man, built brick by brick from the shadow of a boy. — Michael Johnston

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile. — Colm Toibin

One of the things that turns me on the most is imagining new worlds, just as I did as a kid, when I listened to fairy stories and imagined what they looked like and what those worlds were like. — Nick Willing

Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn't face each other, could intuit each other's presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence. — Ben Lerner

Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things. — Hayao Miyazaki

Delilah Bard never read many books.
The few she did had pirates and thieves, and always ended with freedom and the promise of more stories. Characters sailed away. They lived on. Lila always imagined people that way, a series of intersections and adventures. It was easy when you moved through life--through worlds--the way she did. Easy when you didn't care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head. — V.E Schwab

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. — Kim Edwards

When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one.
Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all these places than here. — Tanith Lee

There are worlds of possibility inherent in our consciousness that can facilitate our own transformation. What future have you imagined for yourself? — Deepak Chopra

I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined. — Alice Hoffman

Literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the "actual world" a "new dimension of depth" (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their "stained glass" associations and make them appear in their "real potency" (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy. — Leland Ryken

One of the things he loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic. Once he had been able to do the same ... Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like a vision or silence, you didn't realize it was precious until you lost it. — Cassandra Clare

While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic. — Charles Frazier

My patchwork life: quiet Sunday, coffee on Grace's breath, the unfamiliar landscape of the lumpy new scar on my arm, the dangerous smell of snow in the air. Two different worlds circling each other, getting closer and closer, knotting together in ways I'd never imagined. — Maggie Stiefvater

When you send out a powerful thought into the universe, you send out ripples to all parts of it which come back to you, reflecting what it is you sent out. — Stephen Richards

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter. — John Darnielle

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. — Rudine Sims Bishop

They were both fomidable, but they were also the two people he cared most about in the world-Worlds-and he just wanted to carry them safley forward to the future he imagined, in which no one's life was at stake and the hardest decision of any given day might be what to eat for breakfast, or where to make love. — Laini Taylor

But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself. — C.S. Lewis

It is not possible to design always the same. How to be different in each different place - that is the most important work and duty of the architect to find out. — Jean Nouvel

Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places ... and that's just at Saturn. — Phil Plait

Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge. — Jeffrey Tucker