“The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes.”

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”

“The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.”

“Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.”

“We are meant to discover that we are powerful creators, if not of our entire reality, at least of our experience of reality. We aren't responsible for what each moment holds, but we are responsible for our experience of each moment because we have the power to make any moment heaven or hell.”

“The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.”