"... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...

The way to be invisible - is to truly be imaginary. But since you cannot imagine yourself, you have to clone your imagination into being an image of yourself. Imagine that.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself . . . . And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.

My mom said I was an escapist at heart.... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?

I don't think it is a good mental health practice to fantasize that you know the infinite thoughts of imaginary entities.

Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.

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.

When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.

It's strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what's real and what's imaginary.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it human and otherwise are imaginary excepting only certain of the fairy folk whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession which I was trying to throw off and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

In life single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies they are given imaginary power.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

Happiness is an imaginary condition formerly attributed by the living to the dead now usually attributed by adults to children and by children to adults.

I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present as long as the story is compelling.

I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.

The first-born in every family is always dreaming for an imaginary older brother or sister who will look out for them.

As is known it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism in the most intimate recesses of its being manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.