Quotations

“One of these days I shall describe a country I have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds and all.”

Asserting the imagination's ability to create landscapes independent of direct experience · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 16 April 1845

Robert Browning

“All you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas—or not rightly in distrusting them, as the case may be.”

Suggesting that travel tests and clarifies what the imagination already possesses · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 16 April 1845

Robert Browning

“The further the poet finds it necessary to recede from his own time, the less trustworthy is his imagination, the more constrained his sympathy.”

Arguing that poets should remain engaged with the life of their own age · Essay, On My Own Tentatives

Robert Williams Buchanan

“I, on the other hand, am a dreamer, a whiner after the Unknown and Unknowable. I was ‘built that way.”

A self-deprecating description of his lifelong attraction to mystery · Letter to George R. Sims

Robert Williams Buchanan

“What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping.”

Presenting artistic creation as the imaginative rearrangement of materials already available to us · Letter to Sidney Cox, December 1914

Robert Frost

“To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in the delight of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.”

Original: Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve. — Captures the Symbolist ideal of suggestion, mystery and the reader’s imaginative participation. · Interview with Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891 (French)

Stéphane Mallarmé

“To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the despair of every artist.”

Capturing the artist's struggle to make an inner vision tangible · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

E. Nesbit

“To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on another, to make a cairn, not a house.”

A concise observation on the need for vision before creation · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

E. Nesbit

“The only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after all, the best magic in the world.”

Celebrating imagination as the source of genuine enchantment · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

E. Nesbit

“The more highly cultivated the imagination the more intensely joyous are the games.”

Linking imaginative development with a richer experience of play · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter I: Romance in Games

E. Nesbit

“Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.”

Connecting imagination with empathy and moral understanding · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

E. Nesbit

“But I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man, as many genii in the curling smoke of a steam engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the embers of a sea-coal fire.”

Celebrating an imagination capable of transforming ordinary sights · Journal, 1 January 1827

Sir Walter Scott

“This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart.”

Seeing nature as a refuge for imagination amid ordinary labour · Essay, Female Portrait Gallery, No. I

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“The imagination, which is the source of poetry, has in every country been the beginning as well as the ornament of civilization. It civilizes because it refines.”

Arguing that imagination contributes fundamentally to civilisation · Essay, On the Ancient and Modern Influence of Poetry

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“An ebony flute ought to be very effective for most any sort of singing for that matter.”

Using musical imagery to imagine a voice capable of expressing many shades of experience · Column, The Ebony Flute, August 1926

Gwendolyn B. Bennett

“I shall so like to paint their dear little house in Brittany.”

Revealing his eagerness to make imagined places vivid through words · Letter, quoted in an 1887 reminiscence

Philip Bourke Marston

“I want to tell them of what the flowers talk about when the garden is very still.”

A characteristic expression of Marston's imaginative intimacy with the natural world · Letter, quoted in an 1887 reminiscence

Philip Bourke Marston

“Hopeless visionary, am I not?”

A self-aware acknowledgement of the imaginative temperament that made her feel different from those around her · Letter to an Oberlin friend, 1874

Edith M. Thomas

“Where Spanish life is most stripped of material prosperity, it seems most to abound in suggestions of romance.”

Contrasting material poverty with the imaginative richness she encountered in everyday life · Spanish Highways and Byways

Katharine Lee Bates

“The color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its affinities.”

Describing influence as an organic blending of a writer's mind with congenial ideas and voices · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the world is all before him where to choose.”

Defending imaginative freedom while recognising that some subjects demand genuine understanding · Essay, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“In such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark hand on the imagination, and prompts one to invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that haunts the place.”

Evoking the way historic landscapes can make the past feel almost physically present · Essay, A Note on L'Aiglon, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanished hosts is not novel.”

Reflecting on the enduring imaginative power of places marked by warfare and death · Essay, A Note on L'Aiglon, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“The shabby volume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my literary intentions, good and bad, without any belief in their final resurrection.”

Humorously describing a notebook filled with ideas that will probably never become finished works · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich