Carson McCullers Quotes

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.

I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea.

You cannot stop the human mind from working.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

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.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

You stimulate the neo-cortex, it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe. Your reality.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

There is a lushness to how my mind works.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought.

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.