“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.”

“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. ”

“And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?”

“If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?”

“But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination. ”

“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all logic, nor all mathematics, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.”