Dreams and Imagination

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?

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.

Dreams nourish the soul just as food nourishes the body.

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

They’ve laughed to shield their crying then shuffled through the dreams and stepped ’n fetched a country to write the blues with screams.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

Love is a reality which is born in the fairy region of romance.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

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

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like a snake.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

REALITY PROVIDES US WITH FACTS SO ROMANTIC THAT IMAGINATION ITSELF COULD ADD NOTHING TO THEM.

WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON; AND OUR LITTLE LIFE IS ROUNDED WITH A SLEEP.