Because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.
All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.
Many deceive themselves, imagining they'll find happiness in change.
The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.
Don't stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.
And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.
When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
I asked God "Why, why, why?" I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust.
Imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics.
I think in Arabic at times, but when I'm writing it's all in English. And I don't try to make my English sound more Arabic, because it would be phony - I'm imagining Melanie Griffith trying to do a German accent in Shining Through. It just wouldn't work. But the language in my head is a specific kind of English. It's not exactly American, not exactly British. Because everything is filtered through me, through my experience. I'm Lebanese, but not that much. American, but not that much. Gay, but not that much. The only thing I'm sure of, really, is that I'm under 5'7".
People peep into boxes at moving stereoscopic prints, imagining they're in other worlds, and the crowd around a glassblower wonders whether icicles have formed in summer. Potted trees revive and suddenly look fresh when a florist sprinkles water on them, while papier-mâché turtles hanging out for sale move in the wind and take on souls.
Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
For why are we here if not to try to fathom one another? Not through facts alone, but with the full extent of our imaginations. And what are stories if not tools for imagining?
Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.
I love Marcel Proust, but I leave him to his nostalgia. I don't approach art the way most people do. I don't get into Proust by imagining that I am Charlus or whoever. It's the same thing in painting - I try to look at it objectively. There's no pathos in that. It's like Bach's "Goldberg Variations. " They have to be approached with a scalpel.
There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.
one of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another
When I was a little kid, I loved imagining things. I'd go outside and put on a cape and just imagine I was somebody else.
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.
