Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I had a good imagination and I still have one; a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

I always look on imagination as one of the most powerful things we can cultivate in young people. If they have a good, active imagination, they can cope with life better; they are... able to imagine possibilities and to think around problems.

As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated.

When you're a kid, you're only exposed to what's going on in your mind. The mind is like a bigger-than-outer-space type of thing.

I just get silly inside my head and I start to think about something and in my head I start twisting it around, contorting it and envisioning it in different ways.

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.

Although technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, it has also ensured the erosion of imagination.

Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.

I have a visual imagination.

Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my 'friends.'

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull.

I love to get inspiration from everywhere.

Babies choose to lackadaisically notice the quirkiest of details - unlike us grown ups, who choose instead to focus on what we believe is most essential to us. As a result, babies have a greater expanded consciousness than us grown-ups!

I think I'm constantly surprised that adults can't deal with illogical things or thing that are weird or psychedelic. I've never really lost that.

A man's life is colored by the dye of his imagination.

Television deprives children of their imaginations.