Quotes & Sayings About Memory And Imagination

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood. — George Eliot

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory. — Emil Cioran

I was born in a country of brooks and rivers, in a corner of Champagne, called Le Vallage for the great number of its valleys. The most beautiful of its places for me was the hollow of a valley by the side of fresh water, in the shade of willows ... My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village ... Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green ... The stream doesn't have to be ours; the water doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. — Gaston Bachelard

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. — Siri Hustvedt

The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Memory is imagined; it is not real. Don't be ashamed of its need to create; it is the loveliest part of your heart. Myth is the true history. Don't let them tell you that there are no monsters. Don't let them make you feel stupid, just because you are happy to play down in the dark with your flashlight. The mystical world depends on you and your tolerance for the absurd. Be strong, my darling ones, and believe! — Nick Cave

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character. — Sasa Stanisic

To witness that calm rhythm of life revives our worn souls and recaptures a feeling of belonging to the natural world. No one can return from the Serengeti unchanged, for tawny lions will forever prowl our memory and great herds throng our imagination. — George Schaller

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. — Siri Hustvedt

Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. — Tennessee Williams

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age. — Camille Paglia

I've seen most of what
there is to be afraid of in this world, and to tell you the truth,
the worst of them are the ones that make you afraid in the
light. The things that your eyes see plainly and can't forget
are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination.
Imagination has a poor memory; it slinks away and goes
blurry. Eyes remember for much longer. — Kendare Blake

Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion. — Danilo Kis

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination. — Colm Toibin

Shanta shook her head emphatically, "That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven't invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination. — Aldous Huxley

Imagination has a poor memory, it slinks away and gets blurry. Eyes remember much longer. — Kendare Blake

You are well equipped with an incredible potential for absorbing knowledge. Let your imagination, the key to learning and memory, unleash that brain power and propel you along at ever-increasing speeds. It's not an exclusive path with access granted only to those with a special gift for learning. It is, instead, available to everyone who has a brain. Anything's possible. — Dominic O'Brien

This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. — Frank Herbert

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. — Paul Gauguin

The moments of beauty, the moments when you feel blessed, are only moments; but memory and imagination, treasuring them, can string them together ... Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. — Brian Morton

Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.
When the soul has been moved by an object itself, it is even more affected by the memory of the object. But in a man of genius imagination goes further: it recalls ideas with a more vivid feeling than it received them, because to these ideas are connected a thousand others more appropriate to arouse the feeling. — Jean-Francois De Saint-Lambert

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The fact is that one moves through life like someone moving with a lantern in a dark woods. A bit of the path ahead is illuminated, and a bit of the path behind. But the darkness follows hard on one's steps, and envelopes our trails as one proceeds. Were one to be able, as one never is, to retrace the steps by daylight, one would find that the terrain traversed bears, in reality, little relationship to what imagination and memory pictured. We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant. — George F. Kennan

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination;
and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flower, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. — Oscar Wilde

History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten. — Peter Geye

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary.
I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. — Charlotte Bronte

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. — William Morris

All that happens in the human brain is but the result of electro-chemical reactions. Be it of love, hate, of pleasure, of suffering, of imagination, or all other states of mind, sentiment or sickness; the process depends in every case on the chemical reactions produced in the interior of the brain, and the resulting electrical impulses or messages, be they visual, auditory, based on memory, or an interpretation of new events based on elements that one has in the memory. — Rael

7502Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn't imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of face, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. — Gaston Bachelard

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them. — John Banville

Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory. — John McNee

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. — Mortimer J. Adler

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Drinking wine is easy: tilt glass and swallow. Really tasting wine is more of a challenge. You need the proper tools and environment, the ability to concentrate, a good memory and a vivid imagination. — Marvin Shanken

The collective sensation is one's perspective, experience, memory, imagination, and perception. — Pearl Zhu

Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind's ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind's ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It's in my head now. It's a memory. No camera could have captured what I saw and felt. — S.A. Tawks

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. — Wallace Stegner

If you are free from memory and imagination, you will always be meditative.
If you release yourself from these, meditation is just natural. When you sit for meditation, what is your basic problem? You are either thinking about tomorrow or thinking about what happened yesterday — Sadhguru

Imagination, then, must be the flip side of memory, not so much a calling up as a calling forth. Yet imagination also relies on knowledge: on knowing what is - and is not - possible in this world of fact. Imagination plants the seed or buries the bulb knowing the seasons will shift, seeing, in the mind's eye, April give way to August, the azalea to the rose, knowing that the red leaves of the maple will burnish in autumn, knowing that from this exact window, one can look down to the inlet where the moon's reflection will be just another shimmering white blossom. — Judith Kitchen

He had talked to hundreds of witnesses. And he knew that if someone felt pressured, they would try too hard, and their imagination would fill what their memory couldn't recover. — Chelsea Cain

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. — Edward Gibbon

The voice of the soul and of the imagination is the only voice that makes the soul and the imagination resonate thoroughly and happily; and had you spent a bit of the time you have killed to please others and had you made that bit come alive, had you nourished it by reading and reflecting at your hearth during winter and in your park during summer, you would be nurturing the rich memory of deeper and fuller hours. Have the courage to take up the rake and the pickax. Someday you will delight in smelling a sweet fragrance drifting up from your memory as if from a gardener's brimming wheelbarrow. — Marcel Proust

The term "intellect" includes all those powers by which we acquire, retain, and extend our knowledge; as perception, memory, imagination, judgment, and the like. — William Fleming

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. — Jorge Luis Borges

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don't somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can't fish. — Ted Hughes

Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination. — John Cameron

Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end - and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then - unwittingly - the error or failure itself becomes the "goal" that is consciously held in imagination and memory. — Maxwell Maltz

Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains. — Jane Gardam

One of the proud joys of the man of letters
if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory. — Edmond De Goncourt

The daylight schooled the senses and the night-time developed the wits, stretched the imagination, sharpened fantasy, hammered home the memory and altered the whole scale of values. — Fynn

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains.
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away
One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit
Not only bounded to peculiar arts,
But oft in those confined to single parts
Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before,
By vain ambition still to make them more
Each might his several province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand. — Alexander Pope

If any person desires to think, he must possess memory, imagination and reasoning power; but the Christian has presently lost these powers, hence is unable to think. — Watchman Nee

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts. — B. Catling

Medieval illustrations of the mind from the fourteenth century depict memories like snakes feeding into the imagination and, long before this, both Aristotle and Galen described memories not as archives of our lives, but as tools for the imagination. — Claudia Hammond

An emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.
[ ... ] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence. — Milan Kundera

All self-expression is the product of the imagination, so how can we speak of an objective reflection of the real in words? Or an accurate rendering of the past - speak, memory - as if our memories are the thing in itself and can be reconstructed in words. Fiction or fact? How can you spot the difference, how can you really be sure, when the game seems to be hiding the truth by telling you 'this is the truth'? — Bruce Gatenby

At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. Instead of creating the future, we start repeating the past. Instead of living by faith, we live by logic. Instead of going after our dreams, we stop circling Jericho. But it doesn't have to be that way. — Mark Batterson

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

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

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. — Marcel Proust

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays. — John Lanchester

After he in his memory and imagination had made up, struck out, and discarded many names, now adding to and now subtracting from the list, he finally hit upon "Rocinante," a name that impressed him as being sonorous and at the same time indicative of what the steed had been when it was but a hack, whereas now it was nothing other than the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one's first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality. — Shatrujeet Nath

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it. — Tony Buzan

Memory, like love, is an act of imagination, an abandonment and a possession. — Susan Dodd

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future ... Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands. — Susan Griffin

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false. — Amy Tan

Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don't think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that's our version of the past. Of course models decay, and they change. And so we're constantly reshaping the past. Because the past is us. The past is our foundation. — John Banville

The last glow of sundown dims away. Stars appear in the east. Night encloses us. The ocean seems to enlarge. When you're adrift at night, imagination and perception merge. They have to. You can't see as well, as far, as deep. You tie knots by muscle memory, and you operate your reel mostly by feel. Your boat drifts, your thoughts drift. You sense the sweep of tide and water, and the boat gets rocked in turbulence just past each undersea ridgeline and boulder field. You, too, are looking up, searching constellations, dreaming. You fell again how flexible and expansive your mind can be when it's working right. And you slip your leash to explore the vast vault of sky and great interior spaces. — Carl Safina

You are not suffering yesterday or tomorrow. You are only suffering your memory and your imagination. — Sadghuru

Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring — Sue Perkins

when we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead. — Kathi Weeks

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. — Richard Russo

Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer ... She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true ... She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture ... All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. — Willa Cather

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest - where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge. — Janet Fitch

Happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories ("the place smelled horrible").22 Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.23 Writing turns a fleeting thought into a fact of history, and for Wilkomirski, writing down his memories confirmed his memories. "My illness showed me that it was time for me to write it all down for myself," said Wilkomirski, "just as it was held in my memory, to trace every hint all the way back."24 Just as he rejected the historians at Majdanek who challenged his — Carol Tavris

The Old Days, the Lost Days
in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs. — Beryl Markham

The first step in reawakening our multidimensional nature implies the retrieval of our capacity to navigate through time, which means becoming aware that all experiences we have had in life continue to exist somewhere even if they are not apparently happening in our ordinary perception of time.
This capacity involves a gradual stretching of our dormant multidimensional nature and the exercise of our memory and imagination, which hold the key to the retrieval of all our experiences, as well as the power to choose which one to experience again. — Franco Santoro

She opened her eyes slowly and saw that a pale lavender moth had come to a rest on the back of her hand. She watched it from her pillow, wondering if it was real. It reminded her of her husband Matt's favorite T-shirt, which she'd hidden in a bag of sewing, unable to throw it away. It had a large faded moth on the front, the logo of a cover band out of Athens called the Mothballs.
That T-shirt, that moth, always brought back a strange memory of when she was a child. She used to draw tattoos of butterflies on her arms with Magic Markers. She would give them names, talk to them, carefully fill in their colors when they started to fade. When the time came that they wanted to be set free, she would blow on them and they would come to life, peeling away from her skin and flying away. — Sarah Addison Allen

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well. — Edward Hallowell

Psychological abuse is.. the sustained, repetitive, inappropriate behavior which damages or substantially reduces the creative and developmental potential of crucially important mental faculties and mental processes of a child, including intelligence, memory, recognition, perception, attention, imagination, and moral development. — Kieran O'Hagan

But I'll have to ask you to wait a long time, Anne," said Gilbert sadly. "It will be three years before I'll finish my medical course. And even then there will be no diamond sunbursts and marble halls."

Anne laughed.

"I don't want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want YOU. You see I'm quite as shameless as Phil about it. Sunbursts and marble halls may be all very well, but there is more 'scope for imagination' without them. And as for the waiting, that doesn't matter. We'll just be happy, waiting and working for each other -- and dreaming. Oh, dreams will be very sweet now."

Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed her. Then they walked home together in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew. — L.M. Montgomery

It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself - there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. ("Absolute Evil") — Julian Hawthorne

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. — Tim O'Brien

When we talk about books ... we are talking about our approximate recollections of books ... What we preserve of the books we read - whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully - is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion ... We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. ... What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands. — Pierre Bayard

People who want to acquired powers over somebody else, for them imagination is a powerful tool. If you are seeking liberation, if you want to become free, the first thing that you must become free from is your imagination, because that is the deepest trap. Your memory and your imagination are the two traps. Do you see? One of your legs is stuck in memory; another leg is stuck in imagination. If you release yourself from these, meditation is just natural. When you sit for meditation, what is your basic problem? You are either thinking about tomorrow or thinking about what happened yesterday, isn't it? If you are free from memory and imagination, you will always be meditative. — Jaggi Vasudev

In the words of Harriet Doerr, "One of the best things about aging is being able to watch imagination overtake memory." So who's right? The neurologists? Or Harriet? The answer is both. As we age, either imagination overtakes memory or memory overtakes imagination. Imagination is the road less taken, but it is the pathway of prayer. Prayer and imagination are directly proportional: the more you pray the bigger your imagination becomes because the Holy Spirit supersizes it with God-sized dreams. One litmus test of spiritual maturity is whether your dreams are getting bigger or smaller. The older you get, the more faith you should have because you've experienced more of God's faithfulness. And it is God's faithfulness that increases our faith and enlarges our dreams. There is certainly nothing wrong with an occasional stroll down memory lane, but God wants you to keep dreaming until the day you die. — Mark Batterson

Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought. — William Hazlitt

My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things. — John Marsden

Vision is the best manifestation of creative imagination and the primary motivation of human action. It's the ability to see beyond our present reality, to create, to invent what does not yet exist, to become what we not yet are. It gives us capacity to live out of our imagination instead of our memory. — Stephen R. Covey

Internal and external world is interdependent. Your experiences and impressions of the outside world shape your thoughts and imagination, while making the choice and decisions, from your internal thought process, creates your physical reality. — Roshan Sharma

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it — Thomas Carlyle

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. — Haruki Murakami

Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn't a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized. And — Durga Chew-Bose

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap. — John Fowles