imagination Quotes

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”

“There’s nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

“But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time. Tom presently began to drift insensibly back into the concerns of his life again. What if he turned his back, now, and disappeared mysteriously? . . . [H]e would join the Indians . . . He would be a pirate! That was it! Now his future lay plain before him, and glowing with unimaginable splendor.”

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?”

“It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it?”

“...because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.”

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

“The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.”

“If you were only one inch tall, you’d ride a worm to school. The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool.”

“All great fighting is the same, Eragon, even as all great warriors are the same. Past a certain point, it does not matter whether you wield a sword, a claw, a tooth, or a tail. It is true, you must be capable with your weapon, but anyone with the time and the inclination can acquire technical proficiency. To achieve greatness, though, that requires artistry. That requires imagination and thoughtfulness, and it is those qualities that the best warriors share, even if, on the surface, they appear completely different.”

“To achieve greatness, though, that requires artistry. That requires imagination and thoughtfulness, and it is those qualities that the best warriors share, even if, on the surface, they appear completely different.”

″[I]t is an overactive imagination that turns men into cowards, not a surfeit of fear, as most believe.”

She rubbed another match on the wall. It burst into a flame, and where its light fell upon the wall it became as transparent as a veil, and she could see into the room. The table was covered with a snowy white table-cloth, on which stood a splendid dinner service, and a steaming roast goose, stuffed with apples and dried plums. And what was still more wonderful, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled across the floor, with a knife and fork in its breast, to the little girl. Then the match went out, and there remained nothing but the thick, damp, cold wall before her.

She lighted another match, and then she found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmas-tree. . . . Thousands of tapers were burning upon the green branches, and colored pictures, like those she had seen in the show-windows, looked down upon it all. The little one stretched out her hand towards them, and the match went out.

Her little hands were almost frozen with the cold. Ah! perhaps a burning match might be some good, if she could draw it from the bundle and strike it against the wall, just to warm her fingers. She drew one out—“scratch!” how it sputtered as it burnt! It gave a warm, bright light, like a little candle, as she held her hand over it. It was really a wonderful light. It seemed to the little girl that she was sitting by a large iron stove, with polished brass feet and a brass ornament. How the fire burned! and seemed so beautifully warm that the child stretched out her feet as if to warm them, when, lo! the flame of the match went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the half-burnt match in her hand.

“Isabel was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast . . .”

“The pedagogue’s mouth watered, as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce.”

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

“I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination.”

“If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.”

Because, you see, if the man were an invention—a fabrication—how much easier to make him disappear!

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture. . . . Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.”

I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

“So we set out to make biological attractions. Living attractions. Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world.”

″“Better in body perhaps—” I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word. “My darling,” said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”″

“Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination.”

“One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. When people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a. Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.”

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

“Come over here, we say - to the edge, we say. I want to show you something, we say. We are afraid, they say; it’s very exciting, they say. Come to the edge, we say, use your imagination. And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die in our beds. They to go and to die howsoever, inspiring those who come after them to come to their own edge. And fly. ”

“Crayola plus imagination (the ability to create images) - these make for happiness if you are a child. Amazing things, Crayolas. Some petroleum-based wax, some dye, a little binder-not much to them. Until you add the imagination.”

“When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billion of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river.”

“It’s the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.”

“For the first time in his life he got up every morning with something to look forward to. Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self – his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.”

“Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

“If you work hard enough, assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

″‘It’s no use talking about it,’ Alice said, looking up at the house and pretending it was arguing with her. ‘I’m not going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again – back into the old room – and there’d be an end of all my adventures!’ So, resolutely turning her back upon the house, she set out once more down the path, determined to keep straight on till she got to the hill.”

“Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.”

“Terabithia was their secret, which was a good thing, for how could Jess have ever explained it to an outsider? Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body.”

“Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through”

“Since her death, Owen had hinted that the strongest force compelling him to attend Gravesend Academy—namely, my mother’s insistence—was gone. Those rooms allowed us to imagine what we might become—if not exactly boarders (because I would continue to live with Dan, and with Grandmother, and Owen would live at home), we would still harbor such secrets, such barely restrained messiness, such lusts, even, as these poor residents of Waterhouse Hall. It was our lives in the near future that we were searching for when we searched in those rooms, and therefore it was shrewd of Owen that he made us take our time.”

“Nick: I married her because she was pregnant. … It was a hysterical pregnancy. She blew up, and then she went down.”

″‘So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,’ she said to herself, ‘unless – unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream,’ she went on in a rather complaining tone: ‘I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!‘”

″‘What a curious helmet you’ve got!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Is that your invention too?’ The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I’ve invented a better one than that – like a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a very little way to fall, you see – But there was the danger of falling into it, to be sure. That happened to me once – and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.‘”

“The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.‘”

“Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.”

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ”

“She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs – or, at least, it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet: then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post.”

“‘You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories—’”

“I’ve enjoyed imagining you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it… it’s the paternal instinct, Amory.”

“Except later it was Freak who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it happened or not.”

“He wasn’t only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”

“What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.”

″ The confident young man in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy. ”

“We all benefit from a sense of contact with divinity... even if it is only imagined.”

“We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.”

“Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet in all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps.”

“That was exactly present to me—by which I mean the face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!”

″‘Oh dear,’ said Aziraphale. ‘It’s him.’ ‘Him who?’ said Crowley. ‘The Voice of God,’ said the angel. ‘The Metatron.’ The Them stared. Then Pepper said, ‘No, it isn’t. The Metatron’s made of plastic and it’s got laser cannon and it can turn into a helicopter.‘”

″‘It’s like you said the other day,’ said Adam. ‘You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hang-in’ about for millions of years. ’Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion.‘”

“It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.”

“I cannot imagine how religious persons can live satisfied without the practice of the presence of GOD. For my part I keep myself retired with Him in the depth of centre of my soul as much as I can; and while I am so with Him I fear nothing; but the least turning from Him is insupportable.”

“And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed”

“Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.”

“The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

“The warrior knows that their imagination is not a place to escape but to create.”

“We make Hell real; we stoke its fires. And in its flames our hope expires. Heaven, too, is merely our creation. We can grant ourselves our own salvation. All that’s required is imagination.”

“My momma and poppa appeared from the shadows. They flew to me and wrapped their arms around me and cooled my face with their ghost tears.”

“When Mom first announced that her Bosnian war refugee great-aunt was coming to live with us, I’d pictured a skeletal woman in a shawl, deep half-moon shadows beneath haunted eyes.”

“As long as I had water, I could forget about everything, imagine I was the only person on the planet, a stranger dropped into the desert”

“‘It watches,’ he added suddenly. ‘The house. It watches every move you make.’ And then, ‘My own imagination, of course.‘”

“Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all.”

“Very flash. What he imagines, you see.”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

“It’s really splendid to imagine you are a queen. You have all the fun of it without any of the inconveniences and you can stop being queen whenever you want to, which you couldn’t in real life.”

″‘Having adventures comes natural to some people’, said Anne serenely. ‘You just have a gift for them or you haven’t.‘”

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can stop when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult.”

“POPULATION: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

“The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.”

Yoga Sutra I.5–6: Vrttayah pancatayyah klistaklistah pramana viparyaya vikalpa nidra smrtayah Translation: There are five functions or activities of the mind, which can either cause us problems or not. They are: correct perception, misunderstanding, imagination, deep sleep, and memory.

“Books allowed me not only to travel in my imagination but to look through windows into the world of the unknown and not feel afraid.”

“Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.”

“But it never rained rain. It never snowed snow. And it never blew just wind.”

“When the townspeople went outside, they carried their plates, cups, glasses, forks, spoons, knives, and napkins with them. That way they would always be prepared for any kind of weather. ”

“the dish run[ning] away with the spoon,” and imagines what happens next.

“UP PUP Pup is up. CUP PUP Pup in cup. PUP CUP Cup on pup.”

“Many houses had been damaged by giant meatballs, stores were boarded up and there was no more school for the children.”

“My ears are too beeg for my head. My head ees to beeg for my body. I am not a Siamese cat... I am a Chihuahua!”

″ It’s funny, but even as we were sliding down the hill we thought we saw a giant pat of butter at the top, and we could almost smell the mashed potatoes. ”

“By the time they woke up in the morning, breakfast was coming down. After a brief shower of orange juice, low clouds of sunny-side eggs moved in followed by pieces of toast. Butter and jelly sprinkled down for the toast. And most of the time it rained milk afterwards. ”

“There was a storm of pancakes one morning and a downpour of maple syrup that nearly flooded the town.”

“They glued together the giant pieces of stale bread sandwich-style with peanut butter... took the absolute necessities with them, and set sail on their rafts for a new land. ”

“The Indian was made of plastic again. Omri knelt there, appalled- too appalled to move. He had killed his Indian, or done something awful to him. At the same time he had killed his dream- all the wonderful, exciting, secret games that had filled his imagination all day.”

“The short cut led right to where Harold thought a forest ought to be. He didn’t want to get lost in the woods. So he made a very small forest, with just one small tree in it.”

″ The only thing different about Chewandswallow was its weather. It came three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Everything that everyone ate came from the sky”

″ So he put a frightening dragon under the tree to guard the apples.”

“The sky supplied all the food they could possible want. ”

″ So a decision was made to abandon the town of Chewandswallow. It was a matter of survival.”

″ The people could watch the weather report on television in the morning and they would even hear a prediction for the next day’s food.”

“Whatever the weather served, that was what they ate.”

“The purple crayon dropped on the floor. And Harold dropped off to sleep. ”

“I love to eat cloud.”

″ And in no time he was climbing aboard a trim little boat. He quickly set sail.”

“I know these are not fish sticks. These are ocean nibbles from the supermarket under the sea--mermaids eat them all the time.”

“But I don’t eat green things”

“Oh, this isn’t mashed potato. People often think that but no, this is cloud fluff from the pointiest peak of Mount Fuji.”

“Yes, and he was our little brother. I think that was why”—she thought for a moment, still smiling to herself—“yes, why he told us such impossible stories, such strange imaginings. He was jealous, I think, because we were older—and because we could read better.”

“He would fine the most scaredy-cat kid in the whole world...and scare the tuna salad out of him!”

“He wasn’t big like Eleanor.”

“These are not peas. Of course they are not. These are green drops from Greenland. They are made out of green and fall from the sky.”

“He didn’t have 1,642 teeth, like Tony.”

“Well, I might just try one if they’re all the way from Jupiter.”

“How Hell could be a worse place than Huangling on that terrible night, she couldn’t imagine.”

The book is so intuitive and allows so much expression and voice intonation. The characters are distinct individuals and I could instantly find their voice. The art is simply amazing

It’s just a run of the mill mid-grade fantasy quest Arthurian/Christian symbolism story. And to make matters worse, for me anyway, is that it is just so whimsical and overly descriptive.

The Silk family are large and attuned to each other and the world around them. They live on the fringe a little, love to dress up, embrace imagination and surround themselves with animals and love. Narrated by 8 yr old Griffin this sad, but celebratory, tale is an exceptional read.

Basically the story revolves around Lucy (aka the girl who cried wolf), who tells her family about the wolves lurking behind the wallpapers. Her relatives however dismissed her fears as a product of her overactive imagination, and they are actually too engrossed into their own worlds to deal with Lucy: her mother (like any mother) is a personification of domestic order, her oblivious father plays tuba, and her annoying brother plays video games.

With a weapon-wielding hero and a villain who doesn’t make Mondays any nicer, Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom launch is imaginative and gripping. After an action-packed crescendo to the book’s middle -- when Arthur finally learns his destiny -- Nix keeps the drama going and doesn’t let it fall.

Honor doesn’t like going to school and uses her vivid imagination to describe all the reasons she doesn’t like it. At the end of the book Honor is sad because although she doesn’t have to go to school anymore, she still says she’ll miss it.

“You’re excused! You may go. Your fingernails aren’t very clean.”

On Earth, a boy named Arthur Penhaligon (the main character) is at a new school. He collapses during an outdoor cross country run during gym because of his severe asthma. Two of his schoolmates, Ed and Leaf, stop to help him use his inhaler before running to get help.

Caldecott Medal winner Peggy Rathmann has created a highly original story told in a lilting text and a bold new style with classic black silhouettes against stunning skies of many colors that change and glow as afternoon turns into evening.

“She turns her thinker-upper on. She lets it softly purr. It thinks up friendly little things with smiles and fuzzy fur.”

“I can lick twenty-two tigers today...”

“Silly child, how can you imagine that this wooden doll from Nuremberg is really alive and capable of moving about?”

“Down here, on his own, far beneath the surface of the earth, he couldn’t make any enemy of his imagination.”

“I once knew a fellow who had twelve teeth, five up on top, and five underneath...”

“It’s not fair, after all, to lick tigers so small.”

“You! Down there! WIth the curly hair. Will you please step out of line.”

“Poor Zooie got so awfully mad so mad he could have spit.”

“I can lick thirty tigers today!”

“See the Wily Wallo who can throw his long tail as a sort of lasso! With a flip of the hip, with a tail of his kind he can capture whoever is standing behind! He can capture old Sneelock. I’m sure he won’t mind.

“Oh, the stuff that I could eat!”

“Uncle Terwilliger waltzes with bears.”

“An elephant pulling a thing so light would whip it around in the air like a kite. But he’d look simply grand with a great big brass band!”

“The next thing you know i’ll go and I’ll capture a wild Tick-Tack-Toe, with X’s that win and with Zeros that lose.”

He looks at me and sternly says, “Your eyesight’s much too keen.”

“Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.”

“A reindeer is better; he’s fast and he’s fleet, and he’d look mighty smart on old Mulberry Street. ”

It is a story about family, pets, animals, the sea and its numerous creatures, an island nestling a forest and its mysterious beings; an old man in his world building it to a kingdom of his own along with the orangutans and the gibbons; men and animals living together; separations and wars.

“Nothing,” I said, growing red as a beet, “But a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street.”

Being a children’s book, I thought I would love it for the innocence in the writing and the illustrations. But heck, no (again!) I enjoyed it for what it is. Full of adventure, full of Robinson Crusoe vibes.

“And that makes a story that’s really not bad! But it still could be better. Suppose that I add…”

“And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.”

“That can’t be my story. That’s only a start. ”

“But he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him.”

Lotta opened it. “What have you got there?” asked the dog. “Almond cake,” said Lotta, biting off a large piece. The dog licked his lips. He could smell the almonds and the sugar and the eggs and the milk. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sat next to such a large piece of almond cake. Lotta chewed, swallowed and took another bite. The dog swallowed too. He wondered if he would be quick enough. He would jump up at the girl, she would drop the cake, and then he would grab the cake and run. Three seconds, thought the dog, maybe four.

“A dinosaur held his nose as he looked around.”

Morpurgo here spins a yarn which gently captures the adventurous elements one would expect from a desert-island tale, but the real strength lies in the poignant and subtle observations of friendship, trust and, ultimately, humanity.

“Dancing dinosaurs broke up the roads.”

“I spied my shadow slinking up behind me in the night, I issued it a challenge, and we started in to fight.”

“When he isn’t locked in his room or the cellar for punishment), the little redheaded boy known as ‘Poil de Carotte’ [‘Carrot Top’] manages to triumph through imagination, cunning, and sheer persistence.”

“Yubbazubbies, you are yummy, you are succulent and sweet, you are splendidly delicious, quite delectable to eat...”

“I wrestled with that shadow, but it wasn’t any fun, I tried my very hardest— all the same, my shadow won.”

″..how I smack my lips with relish when you bump against my knees, then nuzzle up beside me, chirping, “Eat us if you please!”

Prelutsky really uses his imagination writing about things we’ve thought about and things we’d never even imagined. The poems open readers up to the world and minds of children.

“Who was it then? I looked under the table. I lay down flat on my stomach in order to check whether someone was hiding under the sofa saying ‘Omps.’ Of course, no one was there. Everyone knows that there’s never anyone under the sofa.”

″ Gray sheep, gray sheep. Which was all nice enough, until the bright orange balloon floated by.”

“So her mother suggested she write a letter, and she did! The pages are filled with drawings, photographs, and plenty of great details.”

“Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives.”

“To save Rin, Rowan and his companions must conquer not only the Mountain’s many tricks, but also the fierce dragon that lives at its peak. ”

“Annad could not imagine the valley without the village. But Roawn could. Reading the old stories in the house of books, listening half asleep to Timon under the teaching tree, and most of all, sitting on the grass by the stream while the bukshah grazed around him in the silence of the morning, he had often imagined this place as the first settler must have seen it.”

Young Spider is different from other boys; he’s handicapped both mentally and physically. But he has a marvellous affinity with animals of every sort. A crowstarver is someone who scares crows away from the growing corn, and Spider is the best crowstarver there ever was; and in his understanding and love of all animals, even the croaks, as he calls them, he finds fullfilment.

“Full of sympathetic characters, wildly imaginative situations, and countless exciting details, the first installment in the series assembles an unforgettable magical world and sets the stage for many high-stakes adventures to come.”

Jess’ parents are worried, though. Before they left, Jess’ grandfather had a heart attack. He insisted on being let out of the hospital in order to go on vacation, but their vacation spot is so secluded, they worry he will have another heart attack and won’t be able to get to a hospital again in time.

“The Bear went over the mountain, the Bear went over the mountain. The Bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see. But all that he could see. But all that he could see.”

“Our visions are the world we imagine, the tangible results of what the world would look like if we spent every day in pursuit of our why.”

“Summer is over. The fields and forests are gone, and now there are just streets and cars everywhere. When Rosa and her aunt go out for a walk, Rosa sits down on the sidewalk. Or she lies down and closes her eyes. ”

“A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms.”

″ Furthermore, there seems to be a mystery surrounding this place. She keeps seeing a boy out in the river at the strangest hours, a boy she suspects is watching her. Who is he? Is he really as mysterious as Jess thinks, or is her imagination simply running away with her?”

“Jess’ parents are worried, though. Before they left, Jess’ grandfather had a heart attack. He insisted on being let out of the hospital in order to go on vacation, but their vacation spot is so secluded, they worry he will have another heart attack and won’t be able to get to a hospital again in time.”

“Charly, Falco and Mysan live in one room. Mysan is shy_mostly with girl dog, even though she’s a girl herself. Charlie and Falco are best friends. They are like two policemen who watch over everyone, so no one gets lost on walks. The other dogs don’t see the point. They want to decide on their own whether they are going to get lost or not.”

″‘Hmm?’ said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.”

“Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

“Your vision is only actionable if you say it out loud. If you keep it to yourself, it will remain a figment of your imagination.”

“You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”

″...He asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!”

″...and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. ”

“Jennifer groaned. ‘How do you know? How can you tell when you’re in love?’ That was something that Anastasia had thought about a great deal. She had stood in the corner drugstore, reading a questionnaire called “is it really love?′ in Cosmopolitan until the pharmacist, Mr. Belden had said, ‘Pay for ir or close it up, girlie.”

“They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.”

The children travel together because it is easier than being alone. As they forget their own family in the war zone that Afghanistan has become, their resilience, imagination and luck help them survive.

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”

“One night when the flies were very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to be a jockey.”

“If I had a winged horse, I would fly him to the moon; he would be more comfortable there.”

“Mary Katherine should have anything she wants, my dear. Our most loved daughter must have anything she likes…”

“She jumped out of bed and went to tell Mother and Father. When she got to their door, she thought about it some more and decided not to tell them. She went back to her room.”

“You’re expecting us to go back there, to put ourselves at risk, and saying you’ll talk to them again just isn’t good enough! We though you had talked to them!′ The other chorused and nodded agreement, hair flying, beards bobbing.”

“She saw something big and dark. ‘Giants are big and dark’, she thought. ‘Maybe that is a giant. I think it is a giant. I think that giant wants to get me.’ ”

“Your husband is a wonderful man with a wonderful imagination, but frankly in this matter I think he’s off his head. Never mind, you’ll all have a lovely holiday in Switzerland and when you come back to Berlin in a few weeks time we’ll all go to the Zoo together.”

“But I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.”

“On one wall of Roy’s bedroom was a poster from the Livingston rodeo that showed a cowboy riding a ferocious humpbacked bull. The cowboy held one hand high in the air, and his hat was flying off his head. Every night before turning off the lights, Roy would lie on his pillow and stare at the poster, imagining that he was the sinewy young bull rider in the picture.”

″‘An actor?’ Bore blurted as if it finally got through to him. ‘Dad, it’s the only thing I’m really interested in doing. I want to go to acting school right after graduation. Everyone says that’s what I should be, with my imagination—’ ‘Try eating your imagination when you’re hungry sometime.‘”

“Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.”

When the time comes, he finds Nangiyala just as wonderful as he’d imagined. However, Nangiyala is under threat.

Ten-year-old Jenny’s new foster mother doesn’t live up to her expectations until Jenny discovers that there are more important things in life than lavish gifts and fancy homes.

“Lexie isn’t used to people and she’s got plenty of imagination so she doesn’t miss other children, she makes her playmates of animals or anything.”

“Glory! Glory! And the enormous dragon, the bulldozer breathing smoke and pushing the great gums over- wandering about wherever it liked roaring and bellowing like a- well, like a bulldozer... you had to love Terkie a little bit for letting you see all that!”

“Her happiest times were when the Vicar was in London and Miss Brown was in bed with a headache. Then she would be mad with pleasure, a sort of wild but earnest puppy rushing about with the slipper of her imagination, tearing the heart out of it.”

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it — or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it.”

“This is the hand that slid round the bath to find the soap that wouldn’t float. This is the hand on the hot water bottle meant to warm my bed that got lost instead.”

“But at the end of the week he heard the best adventure of all. ‘Listen to what happened to Tashi yesterday,’ Jack said to Mum and Dad at dinner. ‘Last night there was a knock at Tashi’s door and when he opened it, guess who was standing there!”

“What struck Tom’s youthful imagination was the desperate and lawless character of most of the stories. Was the guard hoaxing him? He couldn’t help hoping that they were true. It’s very odd how almost all English boys love danger. You can get ten to join a game, or climb a tree, or swim a stream, when there’s a chance of breaking their limbs or getting drowned, for one who’ll stay on level ground, or in his depth, or play quoits or bowls.”

“If I understand you aright, dearie, you imagine that your natural perfume is sweeter than the roses. Well, your are wrong, dearie, you’re wrong.”

“We can sit on a limb and think about things. Or play pirate ship up in the tree. If it is an apple tree we can climb it to pick the apples.”

“Bevis put himself so into it, that he did it all, he bribed the porter, he played the harp, and drew the sword; these were no words to him, it was a living picture in which he himself acted.”

“The children’s book follows the adventures of the Little Captain, sailing in his ship called the Neversink. ”

“Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”

“The fact dawns on him that he will never own a dog because it’d be too big for the house and central London is no place to raise a large dog.”

“This giant had some sort of magic in his legs.”

“I would love to go somewhere else and pick peachy fruits in the early morning from the back of an elefunt.”

“And you’ll find yourself wishing that you were out there in Fotta-fa-Zee and not here in this chair.”

“She noticed immediately that they were now in an altogether paler country. The sun had disappeared above a film of vapor. The air was becoming cooler every minute. The land was flat and treeless and there seemed to be no color in it at all. Every minute, the mist became thicker. The air became colder still and everything became paler and paler until soon there was nothing but grey and white all around them. They were in a country of swirling mists and ghostly vapors. There was some sort of grass underfoot but it was not green. It was ashy grey.”

“One day you will read in the National Geographic of a faraway land with no smelly bad traffic.”

“That’s why they alway put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.”

“Thomas Hammond has always lived next to Leepike Ridge, but he never imagined he might end up lost beneath it! ”

“Rufus is inspired to become a wax statue for the museum, and gathers all the crayons and candles and odd bits of wax in the house to transform himself into ‘Rufus, the Waxworks Boy.”

“Baldmoney acts as the navigator and mechanic on the gnomes’ boat Jeanie Deans, and later invented a glider named Wonderbird.”

“Doraemon has a four-dimensional pouch in which he stores tools, inventions, and gadgets from the future to aid Nobita whenever he is faced with a problem.”

“We’re going to discover the North Pole.” “Oh!” said Pooh again. “What is the North Pole?” he asked. “It’s just a thing you discover,” said Christopher Robin carelessly, not being quite sure himself.

“That’s my tablecloth,” said Pooh, as he began to unwind Tigger. “I wondered what it was,” said Tigger. “It goes on the table and you put things on it.” “Then why did it try to bite me when I wasn’t looking?” “I don’t think it did,” said Pooh. “It tried,” said Tigger, “but I was too quick for it.”

“Is it a very Grand thing to be an Afternoon, what you said?” “A what?” said Christopher Robin lazily, as he listened to something else. “On a horse,” explained Pooh. “A Knight?” “Oh, was that it?” said Pooh. “I thought it was a——Is it as Grand as a King and Factors and all the other things you said?” “Well, it’s not as grand as a King,” said Christopher Robin, and then, as Pooh seemed disappointed, he added quickly, “but it’s grander than Factors.” “Could a Bear be one?” “Of course he could!” said Christopher Robin. “I’ll make you one.” And he took a stick and touched Pooh on the shoulder, and said, “Rise, Sir Pooh de Bear, most faithful of all my Knights.”

Oh, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it a lovely place? Suppose she wasn’t really going to stay here! She would imagine she was. There was scope for imagination here.

“It’s five miles; and as you’re evidently bent on talking you might as well talk to some purpose by telling me what you know about ourself.” “Oh, what I know about myself isn’t really worth telling,” said Anne eagerly. “If you’ll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you’ll think it ever so much more interesting.”

“It was a very lonesome place. I’m sure I could never have lived there if I hadn’t had an imagination.”

“Do you never imagine things different from what they really are?” asked Anne wide-eyed. “No.” “Oh!” Anne drew a long breath. “Oh, Miss—Marilla, how much you miss!”

“I imagine a good deal, and that helps to pass the time.”

“Mr. Bell made an awfully long prayer. I would have been dreadfully tired before he got through if I hadn’t been sitting by that window. But it looked right out on the Lake of Shining Waters, so I just gazed at that and imagined all sorts of splendid things.”

She danced up to the little looking-glass and peered into it. Her pointed freckled face and solemn gray eyes peered back at her. “You’re only Anne of Green Gables,” she said earnestly, “and I see you, just as you are looking now, whenever I try to imagine I’m the Lady Cordelia. But it’s a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular, isn’t it?”

“I’ve had my doubts about that imagination of yours right along, and if this is going to be the outcome of it, I won’t countenance any such doings.”

“How perfectly lovely! You are able to imagine things after all or else you’d never have understood how I’ve longed for that very thing.

“The idea of Miss Stacy telling us to write a story out of our own heads!” “Why, it’s as easy as wink,” said Anne. “It’s easy for you because you have an imagination,” retorted Diana, “but what would you do if you had been born without one?”

“Marilla is a famous cook. She is trying to teach me to cook but I assure you, Diana, it is uphill work. There’s so little scope for imagination in cookery. You just have to go by rules.”

“Do you suppose it’s really right to act like this? Mrs. Lynde says that all play-acting is abominably wicked.” “Ruby, you shouldn’t talk about Mrs. Lynde,” said Anne severely. “It spoils the effect because this is hundreds of years before Mrs. Lynde was born.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?”

She did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.

The boy early developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father and distracted his mother, for he tried to imitate every machine he saw, and kept the nursery in a chaotic condition, with his ‘sewinsheen’, a mysterious structure of string, chairs, clothespins, and spools, for wheels to go ‘wound and wound’.

“The moment I understand it there will no longer exist a telegraph for me; it will be nothing more than a sign from M. Duchâtel, or from M. Montalivet, transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two Greek words, têle, graphein. It is the insect with black claws, and the awful word which I wish to retain in my imagination in all its purity and all its importance.”

I fancy you have no further need of me than to recommend you not to allow your imagination to take too wide a field.

“But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness—imagination.”

When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.