Norman O. Brown Quotes

Your hands are tied in action, but your hands are not tied in imagination and everything springs forth from the imagination. Everything.

I still do miss the freedom to play any kind of character I wanted to play.

Art is more engaging that propaganda.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.

The dumber the thing is, the more excitement I get from imagining a very complex world of truth around it.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

I think it's better to have ideas.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

- But Abraham, you mean I'm supposed to make stuff up !?!? - You are creators, you make stuff up all the time!

Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Language is the machine of the poet.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic Reality.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.