Quotes & Sayings About Imagining Things

The way we envision the stars is by imagining they're attached to a giant invisible sphere surrounding the earth. It is a total fiction, really - just a construction we came up with to help us get our heads around the complexity of it all ... The ecliptic, put simply is the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. But since we all live here on earth, we observe the sun to be moving along this plane instead. Why? Because what would be the point of looking at things from the perspective of the sun? That's no use to anyone ... Ergo, it's an imaginary circle, as it's only a part of our human construction of the cosmos. — Benjamin Wood

Would I ever have the courage to tell Wills the truth? That he wasn't just imagining the world was a more difficult place for him to understand than for some of his buddies - that it was, in fact, more difficult for him. That he'd been dealt a rotten hand in that regard, but only in that one regard. Because I wouldn't change one freckle, one misunderstood moment, one tiny piece of him for anything in the world. I would change myself. I would change the things other people said or thought out of ignorance or fear. I would change so many things, but I would absolutely never, in a million years, change him. — Monica Holloway

We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them. — John Green

When someone sees something old they think it's worth more than something new. I'll give them that. The history, imagining who might have stood or sat or eaten at a piece hundreds of years before gives it a value you can't hang a price tag on, but I've never thought it was ten times the value of a new piece. I think some things are better when new, then you can grow old together. — James L. Rubart

I have no idea what you just said. I couldn't stop looking at her mouth. It was a little swollen, and I wanted to kiss her again and again, over and over until she couldn't breathe properly anymore. My libido had kicked into overdrive, and I was't having any problem imagining all the things I'd like to do. — Lacey Weatherford

Our heads are full of comparisons, needs for approval and attention, a desire to be at other places, imagining things could be better there and thus hating our reality.
We are the only ones to blame for our own suffering.
We hurt ourselves every time we think of how other people should behave according to our standards and then suffer when they appear to be individuals; every time we open a book with so many expectations about it from what we've heard and hoped it to be, and then close it in disappointment, realizing it's something totally different (maybe beautiful, inspiring and challenging, but nothing that met our expectations). — Lidiya K.

Long hours, hard labor, or burning the midnight oil will not produce a Milton, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. People accomplish great things through quiet moments, imagining that the invisible things from the foundation of time are clearly visible. You can imagine — Joseph Murphy

Humans are so good at imagining things, they invent gods who feel so real, they then betray us by not existing. — Samantha Hunt

No matter where you are, no matter how small or pathetic you may feel, freeing your wayfinder's Imagination by embarking on an adventure turns you into some kind of crazy-strong electromagnet. Take out all the stops, drop into Wordless Oneness, laugh and play and love and dream beyond all reason, and miraculous things begin happening. Doors open. Paths appear. Team members you've never met find their way through time, space, and every other barrier to help you. You simply wait, Imagining, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet you. It's not necessary that you believe this. Imagining it is enough. HOW NOT TO IMAGINE — Martha N. Beck

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing? — Cathleen Schine

The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they're imagining a hundred different things. — Jason Fried

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand. — William Gibson

You are weak, Savannah. I can feel it when our minds merge."
"Stay out of my mind. You certainly weren't invited." Her hands went to her hips. "And just for the record, your mind needs to be washed out with soap! Half the things you think we're going to do are never going to happen. I could never look at you again."
He laughed. Aloud.An actual, real laugh. It welled up unexpectedly and emerged low and husky, with genuine amusement. Gregori nearly leapt the distance between them and dragged her into his arms, grateful beyond imagining.
She flung a pillow at his head. "Go ahead and laugh, you arrogant jerk." She wished she had a two-by-four handy. — Christine Feehan

When we speak of ancient times, Rud Elalle, we find in our words things far nearer to hand, and all those emotions we imagined new, blazing with our youth, we find to be ancient beyond imagining. — Steven Erikson

It's so much easier to be happy. It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing, or what it is that you're imagining you're missing. It is so much more peaceful. — Meryl Streep

That 99 of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99 of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. — David Foster Wallace

Not into older guys, huh?" asked Adrian once we were alone.
"You're imagining things," I said. "Clearly, my stunning beauty has clouded your mind. — Richelle Mead

Around every corner is another gift waiting to surprise us, and it will surprise us if we can achieve control over our natural tendencies to make comparisons [to things that are better rather than things that are worse], to take things for granted [rather than imagining how much worse things would be if they weren't there and so feeling grateful], and to feel entitled! — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive. — James Frain

He hurried to car and set off home, hoping he was imagining things, which he had never hoped before, because he didn't approve of imagination. — J.K. Rowling

Say it, Christa! Dammit, was I imagining things, or did you say that you loved me?" "I - " She paused. "I said it!" she whispered. "And you meant it?" She lowered her gaze and then her head. "I meant it. — Heather Graham

Nuh-uh, you're not getting off that easy. I want you to say it. Tell your big brother about your crush on your other big brother."
"You're imagining things. I'm not crushing on Reed," I lie.
"Bull."
"I'm not," I insist, but Easton sees right through me.
"Shit, Ella, I need a smoke every time you two are within five feet of each other. — Erin Watt

Fear is the workout we give ourselves imagining what will happen if things don't work out ... Worry is our effort to imagine every possible way to avoid the outcome that is causing us fear, and failing that, to survive the thing that we fear if it comes to fruition. — Seth Godin

Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity. — Steve Lopez

Oh, here we are at the bridge. I'm going to shut my eyes tight. I'm always afraid going over bridges. I can't help imagining that perhaps, just as we get to the middle, they'll crumple up like a jackknife and nip us. So I shut my eyes. But I always have to open them for all when I think we're getting near the middle. Because, you see, if the bridge did crumple up I'd want to see it crumple. What a jolly rumble it makes! I always like the rumble part of it. Isn't it splendid there are so many things to like in this world? There, we're over. Now I'll look back. Good night, dear Lake of Shining Waters. I always say good night to the things I love, just as I would to people. I think they like it. That water looks as if it was smiling at me. — L.M. Montgomery

Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times. — Bjork

It's an odd thing to think about, but try imagining that your breakup is a disease. If you were told that you had a serious yet curable disease, would you go get hammered on a regular basis? Eat two bags of Oreos? Chain-smoke, pop, pills, get stoned, or fuck around? NO YOU WOULDN'T. You would take great care of yourself and cut all the unhealthy things out of your life. Because you love yourself, and even if you don't right now, WE DO. So put the (insert vice here) and start moving on. — Greg Behrendt

Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God. — Giordano Bruno

We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The creature had nut-brown skin mixed with patches of ash. It was human-sized and formed, but its skin looked like the bark of an old, old tree. About the same height as Donna, it was spindly with arms and legs that were all joints and angles. Its face was narrow and pointed, with hair on top of its head like thick moss and narrow black eyes that glinted even in the dim light of the room. The thing's body was clothed in lichen and moss, with vines twining around its sharp limbs. The creature opened its lipless mouth, a dark slash across its twisted face.

Donna's mind flashed back to the party and the shadow she'd seen sliding through the darkness outside Xan's house. She hadn't been imagining things, after all.

The wood elves had returned to the city. — Karen Mahoney

Isabel turns down Oak toward the little vintage shop at Fourth Avenue, thinking of lunch - the Chinese place in Old Town, casting around inside herself for hunger, imagining the tastes of things. — Alexis M. Smith

After over six hundred hours of listening, John knew two more things: That the most profound truth lay in the labyrinths that coiled behind a green door in the interviewee's mind the very second that Alfred Kinsey said, "Tell me about your fantasies"; and, two, that with the proper information and the correct stimuli he could get carefully chosen people to break through those doors and act out their fantasies, past moral strictures and the boundaries of conscience, taking him past his already absolute knowledge of mankind's unutterable stupidity into a new night realm that he as yet was incapable of imagining. Because the night was there to be plundered; and only someone above its laws could exact its bounty and survive. — James Ellroy

The universe does not know whether the vibration that you're offering is because of something you're observing or something you're remembering or something that you are imagining. It just receives the vibration and answers it with things that match it. — Abraham Hicks

What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story. — Christopher Nolan

In all this passage there is a treasury of golden lessons. Let us seek to use them in our daily life. Let us not only read them, but turn them to practical account. Let us watch and pray against worry, and an over-anxious spirit. It deeply concerns our happiness. Half our miseries are caused by imagining things that we think are coming upon us. Half the things that we expect to come upon us, never come at all. Where is our faith? Where is our confidence in our Savior's words? We may well take shame to ourselves, when we read these verses, and then look into our hearts. But this we may be sure of, that David's words are true, "I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his children begging for bread." (Psalm 37:25.) — J.C. Ryle

Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourself. — Jonathan Franzen

When I was a little kid, I loved imagining things. I'd go outside and put on a cape and just imagine I was somebody else. — Haley Joel Osment

As for my destination, I don't think I ever knew one. I walk, I run, in the direction of my dreams. Things change along the way, people change, I change, the world changes, even my dreams change. I don't have a place to arrive, I just keep doing what I know how to do the best that I can do it. I'll probably end up a deluded geriatric in a wheelchair wearing a cape and tights, imagining my own flight out of this world, but of course with a young girl in my arms. — Shahrukh Khan

Is this life?'Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. 'Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to? — Booth Tarkington

But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. — Michael Crichton

That's the key, you know, confidence. I know for a fact that if you genuinely like your body, so can others. It doesn't really matter if it's short, tall, fat or thin, it just matters that you can find some things to like about it. Even if that means having a good laugh at the bits of it that wobble independently, occasionally, that's all right. It might take you a while to believe me on this one, lots of people don't because they seem to suffer from self-hatred that precludes them from imagining that a big woman could ever love herself because they don't. But I do. I know what I've got is a bit strange and difficult to love but those are the very aspects that I love the most! It's a bit like people. I've never been particularly attracted to the uniform of conventional beauty. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who feel compelled to conform. I personally like the adventure of difference. And what's beauty, anyway? — Dawn French

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them. — Andy Couturier

Don't be a fool," Vera Claythorne urged herself. "It's all right. Elly Kleinman and others are downstairs. All four of them. There's no one in the room. There can't be. You're imagining things, my girl. — Agatha Christie

Reluctantly Bastian's thoughts turned back to reality. He was glad the Neverending Story had nothing to do with that.
He didn't like books in which dull, cranky writers describe humdrum events in the very humdrum lives of humdrum people. Reality gave him enough of that kind of thing, why should he read about it? Besides, he couldn't stand it when a writer tried to convince him of something. And these humdrum books, it seemed to him, were always trying to do just that.
Bastian liked books that were exciting or funny, or that made him dream. Books where made-up characters had marvelous adventures, books that made him imagine all sorts of things.
Because one thing he was good at, possibly the only thing, was imagining things so clearly that he almost saw and heard them. — Michael Ende

Life is addition! Death is subtraction. You add to your life by imagining whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, and Godlike. Imagine and feel yourself successful, and you must become successful. You are never a slave to circumstances, environment, or conditions. — Joseph Murphy

Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what's happening around them. It's as if extroverts are seeing "what is" while their introverted peers are asking "what if. — Susan Cain

Here are the things that do fill me: a night sky,
endless and rammed with stars. The soaring
of a soundtrack over a triumphal point
in a film trailer, something inside me stirring
like an animal. Dark roads and cosy cars,
and imagining having somebody I loved
enough to distract me in the front seat.
Helplessness, sometimes. Anger, always. — Elisabeth Hewer

Allie would love what you've done," he remarked. "She was always a softie when it came to things like this."
I folded my hands in my lap. "I wish she could be there this weekend."
Noah glanced at the stack of letters. I knew he was imagining Allie, and for a brief moment, he looked strangely younger.
"So do I," he said. — Nicholas Sparks

He knew that he'd known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things. — Robert Hellenga

Instead of imagining the frightening and the ugly, I will try to find the beautiful in everyday things. — Rosamund Lupton

In addition to being statistically unlikely, perfectly fulfilled expectations are boring. We assume that we, in our infinite wisdom, are capable of imagining the best, most optimal outcomes for ourselves. But as it turns out, unfettered reality and unexpected detours are often the very things that force us to come into our own. — Clara Bensen

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things. — Gary Gygax

I've just been imagining that it was really me you wanted after all and that I was to stay here for ever and ever. It was a great comfort while it lasted. But the worst of imagining things is that the time comes when you have to stop and that hurts. — L.M. Montgomery

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know - that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts. — Daniel Gilbert

He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult. — John Banville

As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much. — John Lennon

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new. — Neil Gaiman

The Beauty of It If all I have is Now, where will I look for Joy? Without hope for the future, without hope that things will change, with no hope of finding what's been lost, and no hope of restoring the past, with only the risk to crack open all that has hardened about me, what will I do with what I have? At first, this might seem scary or sad, but as a tired swimmer comes ashore surprised to find pearls washing through his legs, I lift my tired head again and again to find all I need is right where I am. But being human, I stray and dream of lives other than my own, and soon I am busy wanting something else, somewhere else, someone else; busy imagining something just out of reach to strive for. It leads me to say if you are unhappy or in pain, nothing will remove these surfaces. But acceptance and a strong heart will crack them like a shell, exposing a softness that has always been, exposing a soft thing waiting to take form. It glows. I think it is the one spirit we all share. — Mark Nepo

Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what's happening around them. It's as if extroverts are seeing "what is" while their introverted peers are asking "what if." Introverts — Susan Cain

One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like. — Martin Filler

They have the kinds of things we can eat.' An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she were not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the other things she had become used to in America, even quinoa, Blaine's specialty, made with feta and tomatoes. This was what she hoped she had not become but feared that she had: a "they have the kinds of things we can eat" kind of person. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was imagining alternative-universe versions of myself. Sometimes I was a rosy-cheeked outdoorsy girl who ate flowers and hiked alone, uphill, for miles. Or I was a skydiving, drag-racing, adrenaline-fueled daredevil. Or a chain mail-wearing, sword swinging dragon slayer. It was fun to imagine those things because I already knew who I was. Now I don't know anything. I don't know who I'm supposed to be in my new world. — Nicola Yoon

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course. — John Irving

Don't you think it's time you got out of your own way? Time you stop ending things before they start, time you stopped imagining the worst-case scenario, and giving in without a fight?"
"And if things turn out as bad as I imagine they might?"
"Then you chalk it up to shit happening and get on with your life. — Sara Bell

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one's place in the order of things. — John Pipkin

I can't sleep at night, imagining all the horrible things that could happen. This isn't Pandora's Box. It's Pandora's Nuclear Launch Codes. — Dennis Kunders

Instead of imagining all the things we can accomplish, we ask God to do what only he can accomplish. Yes, we work, we plan, we organize, and we create, but we do it all while we fast, while we pray, and while we constantly confess our need for the provision of God. — David Platt

You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Well, it has to do with very deep things, because it might be that imagining yourself as a girl is a diminishment. But it is something that when I made "The Devil Wears Prada" it was the first time in my life, 30 years of making movies, that a man came up and said I know how you felt. I know how you felt. I have a job like that. People understand. — Meryl Streep

I had all kinds of fantasies, like a lot of girls, but did I actually go through the motions of planning a wedding and buying bridal magazines and imagining things and setting up who would play what role? No. Because as I grew up, I started to believe that I would be one of those gals that never got married. — Sara Ramirez

I don't believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it's just a matter of which way we walk home. I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, than I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street ... or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know. — Lisa Unger

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. — John Dryden

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job. — Sara Sheridan

Rattled. He hurried to his car and set off for home, hoping he was imagining things, which he had never hoped before, because he didn't approve of imagination. As he pulled into the driveway of number four, the first thing he saw - and it didn't improve his mood - was the tabby — J.K. Rowling

I hate that its my favorite thing to watch her, because it shouldn't be. It triggers all these what-ifs in my head, and my mind begins imagining things it shouldn't be imagining ... — Colleen Hoover

You're imagining things. Clearly, my stunning beauty has clouded your mind. -Rose Hathaway — Richelle Mead

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. — George Orwell

Faith is the substance of hope - of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. So if you can hope for it and imagine it, and keep imagining and hoping and seeing yourself driving a new car, or seeing yourself getting that job, or seeing yourself excel, seeing yourself help that person - that is faith. — Duane Chapman

I'd never been one for prayer, but when things got serious, I put it into overdrive, imagining God on the other end thinking, hmmm . . . Emma doesn't usually pray. This must be serious. — Karen McQuestion

We are always imagining something, It is practically impossible to be awake without imagining something. Then why not imagine something at all times that will inspire the powers within us to do greater and greater things? — Christian D. Larson

Writers are never fully present because they're always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way. — Jessica Soffer

I've been clinically diagnosed with sociopathy,' I said. 'Do you know what that means?'
'It means you're a freak,' he said.
'It means that you're about as important to me as a carboard box,' I said. 'You're just a thing - a piece of garbage that no one's thrown away yet. Is that what you want me to say?'
'Shut up,' said Rob. He was still acting tough, but I could see his bluster was starting to fail. He didn't know what to say.
'The thing about boxes,' I said, 'is that you can open them up. Even though they're completely boring on the outside, there might be something interesting inside. So while you're saying all of these stupid, boring things I'm imagining what it would be like to cut you open and see what you've got in there. — Dan Wells

The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about. — Natasha Trethewey

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea. — Richard Feynman

I am not trying to seduce you.

"I know that. But please, Mrs. Robinson. This is difficult for me."

"Why is it," she said

"Because I am confused about things. I can't tell what I'm imagining. I can't tell what's real. I can't --"

"Would you like me to seduce you?"

"What?"

"Is that what you're trying to tell me? — Charles Webb

But cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page. There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what's left; there should be looking at meals' remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become. — Tamar Adler

That's just it. It is not one of our men."
Donald's head jerked toward him. "Who then, Rufus?"
"Jacq," he spit out her name like a curse.
"What?" Donald peered through the darkness to the campfire, now glowing dimmer. "You are imagining things, my lord."
"It is she. I'm certain."
"Damnation." Donald echoed Rufus' original curse. His expression however reflected his awe. "Rufus, does your woman even know she is a woman?"
............
"When you tire of her, I'm going to marry her," Donald promised reverently. — Delilah Devlin

Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don't want to run from. At work you'll realize that you've spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things. — Lena Dunham

Mr. Green Sweater looks normal, but his wingman looks hard-core bad boy," said Vee. "Emits a certain don't-mess-with-me signal. Tell me he doesn't look like Dracula's spawn. Tell me I'm imagining things. — Becca Fitzpatrick

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in. — John Green

Whatever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the continual thought or imagining must at last take form and shape in the world of seen and tangible things. — Prentice Mulford

The grey wall to the right of me had my unfocused eyes attention. The blandness of all four walls and the concrete flooring created a backdrop for my imagination to run wild. Like a blink screen just waiting for a film to start, this bare and depressingly dreary decor did wonderful things for my illusions. I could lay for hours on the floor, staring at seemingly nothing while my mind whirled in a secret place where my reality could not encroach. I'd spend days on end imagining an eleven Kingdom with purple trees and sparkling sapphire oceans. Where I was a guardian of the kingdom, strong and fearless, fighting mythical creatures and villainous traitors. I received adoration from the civilians I was protecting and gratitude from royalty. In this place I was everything I wasn't in the reality. In this place I was wanted. In this place I was alive. — Roxanne Lee

God the way he was looking at her, with no pity or disgust. Intense, with only the slightest softening around his eyes to save his features from harshness. There was something contemplative in his gave, like he was imagining some future where bad things didn't happen to her. As if he was silently begging her to imagine it too. — Kit Rocha

Imagining may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or visions into inventions. — Fred Rogers

The night was shadows and wind and the smell of a storm on the way, a night for crying until the tears were gone but the ache was left. A night for imagining that you could step out onto the windowsill and say hello to the dark, say I am sad and have the wind say I know. You could say I am alive and the trees would sigh back We are too. You could whisper I am alone and everything ends and the stars in the sky would answer We understand. Or maybe it's ghosts telling you all these things, saying We know, we're alone too, we understand how everything and nothing ends. — Ally Condie

There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more. — Lucy Maud Montgomery

What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come. Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow. — Seneca.