Reading Imagination Quotes & Sayings

Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination. — S.A. Tawks

Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov). — Peter Kreeft

One Story At A Time

Stories come to life in your imagination. You can meet new friends, just by reading words. Go places you've never gone before . Adventures and dreams come alive. Tragedies that seemed to work out for good. Stories seemed to capture things that wasn't there before. Friendship that can last a lifetime, just from reading words. It all happens in book, with a little imagination... — Jerrel C. Thomas

Too many questions can cripple imagination, for how can you apply logical questions to something that is not real? — S.A. Tawks

I've turned down a lot of stuff. I've read several scripts and said "That's not me, I'm not interested in doing that." It's got to be something that inspires me and captures my imagination. I want to be able to say "There's a challenge.". — Karl Urban

Reading is the spark to imagination. Ignite yours and live forever free. — Dan Sanders

Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it. — S.A. Tawks

Reading takes you places; it is all up to your imagination. The world (or in this case book) is your canvas, go paint it. — BOB

Books are carnival rides for your imagination. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since. — John Dufresne

When you read a book, you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. — Nina Jacobson

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that. — Sara Sheridan

I could spend all day lost in someone else's imagination. I love reading. — Joanna Bolouri

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. — James Russell Lowell

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo? — Bonnie Jo Campbell

Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding. — Rebecca Solnit

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading. — Michael Tippett

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath. — Paul Kropp

Parents can do three things to make reading active. (1) Elaborate and explain the text to the child. This extends and deepens the experience of the story. (2) Relate the story to the child's own experiences. An interest in reading and understanding the meaning of the text occur if there is 'further information' to personalize the text. (3) Ask questions to ensure the child understands the story, thinks about the characters and plot, and extends their imagination. — Colin Baker

Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued. — Zig Ziglar

It's important to read because it's really good for your vocabulary. It's really good for your imagination. I enjoy reading because I find it relaxing. — Emma Watson

Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul. — Aneta Cruz

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting.
It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned. — Lee Goldberg

Every book is a world. — Gabrielle Zevin

A powerful flight of the imagination ... an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence. — Roger Zelazny

As much as I respect him, he is somewhat of an ignorant fool. — S.A. Tawks

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

You don't read to exercise the mind but to take voyages — John Geddes

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
— Ann Patchett

Could crushed spirit be destroyed if it encountered too much spirit? — S.A. Tawks

WARNING: The production of spirit is a very delicate and dangerous procedure. It should be left to the professionals and under absolutely no circumstance be replicated. — S.A. Tawks

Word porn is the best porn when the imagination is well endowed. — Dez Marie

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. — Nora Ephron

All writers read, Ms Rainn. With dwindling amounts of books circulating imagination, the less writers of all mediums will be able to exercise their own imaginations. — S.A. Tawks

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books ... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh. — Bill Bryson

If you work hard all day and all night, something may come of it. You never know, it just might. — S.A. Tawks

Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives. — Kilroy J. Oldster

And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful. — S.A. Tawks

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. — Jeanette Winterson

You've got to try and not let it keep you down. Sure, let it hurt but don't let it harm you. — S.A. Tawks

My inspiration comes from so many things, it is hard to give credit to one. I find music of all kinds to be a great inspiration. A melody or a lyric can fire my imagination. Exercise is another. Endorphins fuel my thoughts - I tend to work out scenes and dialogue when I am exercising. Reading is also a great inspiration. — Julia London

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library. — Michel Foucault

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone. — Azar Nafisi

Do you know what the best and worst thing about a book is? The author can't answer all your questions, only your imagination can. — S.A. Tawks

The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Band together with the brothers and sisters of misery and never stray. You are the integral part of the deeply depressed. We found you. Hooray. — S.A. Tawks

The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child's play. Imaginative literature
the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes
is an important part of the Christian's literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives. — Tony Reinke

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. — Jeanette Winterson

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader. — Sam Wineburg

We must stop this unimaginable atrocity before it becomes a reality. — S.A. Tawks

The imagination gland doesn't die. It just becomes reliant on manufactured spirit. — S.A. Tawks

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. — Richard Louv

You must learn not to rely so heavily on others. Only then will help come when you truly need it. — S.A. Tawks

He could tell her that dogs used to look like cats and vice versa without a lick of proof and it would change the way she regarded the animals. — S.A. Tawks

Xas sighed. "But I don't want to talk about God. Why do I? Sometimes I feel God is all over me like a pollen and I go about pollinating things with God."
Sobran opened his eyes and Xas smiled at him. Soban said, "I did think that you talked about God to persuade me you weren't evil. But I've decided that, for you, everything is somehow to the glory of God, whether you like it or not."
"I feel that, yes. My imagination was first formed in God's glory. But I think God didn't make the world, so I think my feelings are mistaken."
This was the heresy for which Xas was thrown out of Heaven. Sobran was happy it had finally appeared. It was like a clearing. Sobran could almost see this clearing - a silent, sunny, green space into which not a thing was falling, not even the call of a cuckoo. Xas thought the world was like this, an empty clearing into which God had wandered. — Elizabeth Knox

So I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book ... your imagination just naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. — Max Brooks

When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet. — Deborah Lawrenson

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone. — Thomas C. Foster

They're a group called The Spirit-crushers and their leader is known as The Almighty Spirit-crusher. — S.A. Tawks

You can't lose sleep over should-of's and could-of's. — S.A. Tawks

Reading is a wonderful wonder. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Q: What's hard for you?
A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German. — Tom Waits

Men cannot be nice and kind to a woman and have no affection for them. — S.A. Tawks

No one knows if something works until it actually works. That's why you must always try. — S.A. Tawks

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide
a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere. — Rebecca Solnit

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

It's the fact that fans still care. I like all the comics conventions: The smaller ones are easier, the bigger ones are exciting ... Each one I say: Never again. But they're all great ... These things are important because they keep the fans' interest alive in comics. They keep the fans reading and their imaginations stimulated. — Stan Lee

I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep — Gloria E. Anzaldua

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order. — Nina Jacobson

I live in paradise within the pages of a book. — Lailah Gifty Akita

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling "the Republic of Imagination." I think of it as Nabokov's "somehow, somewhere" or Alice's backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane. — Azar Nafisi

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader. — Katherine Paterson

The highest branch of solitary amusement is reading; but even in the choice of books the fancy is first employed; for in reading, the heart is touched, till its feelings are examined by the understanding, and the ripening of reason regulate the imagination. This is the work of years, and the most important of all employments. — Mary Wollstonecraft

You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way. — Meg Medina

Too much thought can find fault in anything, even if there is no fault to be found. — S.A. Tawks

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings ... if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough. — Italo Calvino

If someone knew equally as much about the ins and outs of your home, it would not be your home. — S.A. Tawks

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life, and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy. — Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process. — LeVar Burton

When you have a lot of books,you don't have to worry about getting bored unless you don't know the essence of reading.Reading is not just about reading,you have to use your imagination,make the characters alive and be one of them,feel them ... and presto,you'll never be alone! — Mareez Reyes

It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination. — S.A. Tawks

Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing. — Aneta Cruz

The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell. — S.A. Tawks

Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories. — S.A. Tawks

Books are like Tarot decks. They provide answers and guidance but more importantly, they are doorways and portals to the otherworld and the imagination. They leave their imprint and keep whispering to us long after we close the pages or shuffle the deck. — Sasha Graham

Eading a book doesn't mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination. — Noam Chomsky

Imagination is a sacred place. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well ... problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read. — Richelle E. Goodrich

She lost touch with reality and was dragged into her imagination. — S.A. Tawks

But I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went ... — Elena Ferrante

Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it's transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa. — Steve Carell

When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there. — S.A. Tawks

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of. — S.A. Tawks

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. — Nora Ephron

In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Every time you think of escaping mentally or physically, grab the book that lies inches away from your heart. — Muna Adnan Naqi

Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know. — S.A. Tawks

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading. — Geraldine McCaughrean