Dreams and Imagination

The imagination is man’s power over nature.

If you wish—

 

[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow...

I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

So hopeless is the world without, The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile and hate and doubt And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou and I and Liberty Have undisputed sovereignty.

 

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

 

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Green, how much I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship upon the sea and the horse in the mountain.

Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.

 

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and a girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Come to me in the silence of the night;

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. 1

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. . . . An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

You came back to us in a dream and we were not here.