Luke Skywalker: There's something alive in here. Han Solo: That's your imagination. Luke Skywalker: Something just moved passed my leg. [sees a tentacle in the water] Luke Skywalker: Look! Did you see that? Han Solo: What? [the tentacle grabs Luke an...
I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either ...
I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being t...
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history ...
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, o...
When I was younger, humans went to the moon when I was about 4 years old, and I imagined that as I got older and became an adult that traveling in space was going to be fairly common and something that we all did. So I grew up believing that I'll be ...
We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I'd never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your...
An author is a trigger to our own imaginations. We either go along for the ride, or we flinch and look the other way. Don't look the other way. Embrace the story, embrace the characters, embrace everything the author wants you to explore, because the...
As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades t...
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, a...
Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the...
I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,' she said. 'Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result....
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right a...
Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so ma...
Barack wants to stop all children from working on the farm... Can you imagine this? I just, I can't fathom that. Did you ever think we'd grow up in America and see something like that? Let me take it one step further. He wants to disallow the 4-H fro...
In all of my work I'm trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, stimulate them to use their own imaginations. I don't just say things recipients want to hear, flatter their egos or comfort them by agreeing with them. I h...
Younger women are willing to go out with high status males. If you look at the kind of women Salman Rushdie attracts, they tend to be intelligent, arty types. For her, it's a kudos thing. The man just wants a good-looking girl because he imagines tha...
I wonder if he'll ever see the truth in my own heart: that, whatever Dustpelt says, however much Fireheart breaks the warrior code, I love him more that I could imagine loving any other cat. And if Fireheart knew, would he love me, too? - Sandstorm
Could I be brave enough to look lower? I could. His black tee shirt licked his hard body and I could only guess what was hidden underneath it. His faded jeans hung dangerously low, revealing a slice of his narrow hips, and I could easily imagine the ...
In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted...
Fantasyland was designed as a home for some of the classic characters [from those films], and as a symbol of the magic, hope and beauty of the human imagination.
