Imaginary Quotes

“She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“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.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“The imaginary is what tends to become real.”
― André Breton

“as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

“Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights. ”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Let us not ruminate on lost cases, creating imaginary scenarios of spite and revenge. Let us honor our valuable mental time, follow a positive road instead, and dump barren and gnawing resentments and destructive anger. ("The umbrella")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“At a certain point, we have to stop ‘play time,’ start ‘construction time’ and get things going, instead of getting mired down in the quicksand of wishful thinking, clutching desperately to imaginary ‘dei ex machina.’ (" Swim or sink")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?”
― Meg Rosoff

“In this stillness that is at the same time movement, in this darkness that is at the same time light, change is found not in the realm of ideas but in the energizing desire that is realized through precipitation. Desire tends towards its own realization and change takes place when the desire for it shatters the bounds of the possible, breaking the dialectical equilibrium holding together the framework of what is existent. It is at such moments that the imaginary flows into the real and overwhelms it, inundating it until it has been absorbed.”
― Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World

“Some things have to be believed in to be seen.”
― Ralph Hodgson

“I spend my life constantly calling in ‘imaginary’ debts that aren’t owed to me in order to avoid the ‘real’ debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“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.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Where's your dog?" Peter's voice came from within the gushing stream of water. Justin thought he must have misheard.
"Pardon?"
"Your dog."
"Yes?"
"Isn't he with you today?" Justin looked at Peter.
"Ha bloody ha." Peter stuck his head out of the stream of water, features dripping. He smiled shyly.
"I love greyhounds." Justin stared.
"My dog is imaginary."
"Oh." Peter looked interested. "That's unusual." Justin put his head under the water. When he emerged, Peter was still looking at him.
"Less work," Peter offered, cheerily. "If the dog's imaginary, I mean. Not so much grooming, feeding, et cetera.”
― Meg Rosoff, Just in Case

“If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that's not what's at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I fake fake to have a fake life. Does that make me a real horse? Buy now for $777, wooden saddle sold separately. Real horseshoes not included. Imaginary ones – neither.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
”
― Nicola Chiaromonte

“Look, Anna,” she says in a panic, “I’ve raised you close to center. Don’t let anyone pull you to the outer edges.”
She rushes to our front-room window. “Your
grandfather is here. No matter what he says, don’t let him draw you into his imaginary world.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“It's sad that, as adults, we stop "playing pretend," practicing the art of seeing two things at once. At a certain age, "imaginary" becomes synonymous with "delusion.”
― Corinne Mucha, The Monkey in the Basement and Other Delusions

“It's certainly possible that the imaginary is best. Like a painting of some idyllic landscape. The place you would most like to be. That you never will.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“But isn't the future always an imaginary thing before it comes?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“There is a widely held belief that the imagination is not to be trusted and that only things scientifically real and provable can be relied on. Yet, many of your greatest scientific inventions comes from the imagination. [...] Everything in your reality existed as a thought before it existed in reality.”
― Sanaya Roman, Duane Packer, Opening to Channel: How to Connect with Your Guide

“The majority of people live their lives under two complementary conditions simultaneously: confined to prisons they don't know they exist and confined to prisons they think they exist.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Invisible did not always mean imaginary.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

“But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“A universally loved rebel, an immensely popular loner, the imaginary writer is everyone's favorite, if only because you don't have to read anything to appreciate their work, although I must say I prefer their earlier stuff.”
― Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?

“There was a tremendous flash, as the crystal of the Secret Country exploded into a billion colored shards, and a ringing, terrible, sustained crash as the land, from end to end, from the Mountains of the North to the Dubious Hills, from the Wide West Waste to the Sunrise Sea, cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, the boost of heraldry and pomp of power, all that heart heard of or mind expressed, trees, flowers, cottages, and wells, the unicorn, the cardinal, the dragon, and the owl, sun, moon, stars, clouds, the loving detail of High Castle, the barely imagined cities of the Dwarves, the fabulous mines whence came Lord Randolph's ring, the Green Caves and the Magic Wood, King John's solemn tomb, Laura and Ellen downstairs, the stones beneath them and their very bones, shook, rang, shattered, and seemed to collapse in dust.”
― Pamela Dean, The Secret Country

“What can be is not what it is,
And what's possible is not the present. Things we can do is not how we act,
And what we can be is not who we are.”
― Grey R.B., Eclipse: Trapped in Darkness