Literary Imagery Quotes

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

Pu La's writing is multi-layered, multi-faceted, and deep.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. It is my lady, O, it is my love! Oh, that she knew she were!

I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Stories are like a river that flows - you dip a bucket in it

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

I mean, there are things in the book you could never do in a movie.

The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh.

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.