imagination
It takes a particular lack of imagination to feel no discomfort in the presence of a cleaner.
Twitter, April 9, 2010.
Next to imagination you have to have perseverance in order to create something of value. I may even say that perseverance is more important than imagination in a certain sense. A modest amount of imagination with a great ability to persevere can produce an important work. Great imagination lacking the perseverance to develop, shape, and carry it out can result in failure.
Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design, by Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 386.
The most hopeful sign, the only one, in these hard times is how much individual initiative manages to make its way up through the asphalt, so many tough shoots of human imagination.
Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 18.
It would be a complete error to suppose that the great discoverer is one who seizes at once unerringly upon the truth, or has any special method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind far exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must almost of necessity be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record may remain of more than the hundredth part.
The Principles of Science (London: Macmillan, 1874), 221–22.
One January day when I was four, the au pair from Denmark who was helping out my parents while my sister was in the hospital took me for a walk in the woods. She’d been reading me the chapter in Winnie the Pooh where Pooh and Piglet go round and round the spinney in the snow, trying to catch the Woozle. “Let’s go and find Piglet,” she said. The Keele woods were under snow as well, that day. The snow was deep and powdery on the paths, and the trees were smoothed, white masses bowed under the weight of winter, like melted candles. We passed through a zone of little fir trees near the bottom of the steps down into the woods, leaving behind a trail of big footprints and a trail of little ones … And there, perched on the hollow stump of an oak, was Piglet, wearing a small red scarf exactly as in the pictures. The soft toy versions of the Disney characters did not exist yet. She had sewn him herself from gray and white cotton ticking. It was wonderful.
The Child That Books Built (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 61–62.
It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. Robert [Mapplethorpe] infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power. He transformed a ring of keys, a kitchen knife, or a simple wooden frame into art. He loved his work and he loved his things. He once traded a drawing for a pair of riding boots—completely impractical, but almost spiritually beautiful. These he buffed and polished with the devotion of a groom dressing a greyhound.
Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 136.
I imagined everything. I never thought it would happen.
Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 32.