Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl’s eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.
That’s the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.
Imagination is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can’t be transformed into food for the imagination.
The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea.
Then you will have to trust me. Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope, trust me.
It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.
Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art.
Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter’s language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?
Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom; it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.
Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.
Men see what they are most afraid of.
Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason.
All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.
Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.
Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.
But even in the schoolyard I’d been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he’d been raised by foxes and language was his second language.
There are no simple words. I don’t know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.
I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King’s white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you – I swear that.
Shall I add a man to my collection?