quotations about fantasy
A long time ago, in a conference room far, far away... it was ordained that sword-and-sorcery movies would be the Next Big Thing. Just imagine crossing the fantasy worlds of JRR Tolkien and George Lucas! Mythic reverberations! Megabucks! Didn't work.
RICHARD CORLIS
"Looking back at Ridley Scott's Legend", Den of Geek, February 29, 2012
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
EVAN HARRIS WALKER
The Physics of Consciousness
People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees.
JALALUDDIN RUMI
attributed, The Pocket Rumi Reader
The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
At heart, the issues raised in a work of fantasy are those we face in real life. In whatever guise--our own daily nightmares of war, intolerance, inhumanity; or the struggles of an Assistant Pig-Keeper against the Lord of Death--the problems are agonizingly familiar. And an openness to compassion, love and mercy, is as essential to us here and now as it is to any inhabitant of an imaginary kingdom.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
Newberry Award acceptance speech, 1969
Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, it's the lousy ones you have to look out for.
WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
interview, Publisher Weekly, January 31, 2011
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
LIONEL TRILLING
The Liberal Imagination
The function of fantasy is a process of substitution with one important provision, namely, that the ego be in a state of regression which arrests the ongoing process of mental development. The fantasy-displaying ego is constantly one step behind the unfolding psychic process; it keeps referring to past organizations and occurrences in order to assuage the principle of pleasure. It is a process of a rather methodical rediscovery of remembrances which were not allowed to become participants in reality. They participate in fantasy; that is, in an imagination of rediscovery.
JAROSLAV HAVELKA
The Nature of the Creative Process in Art: A Psychological Study
Fantasy has no existence without feeling.
HAROLD SCHEUB
Story
What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Ferragus
In the algebra of fantasy, A times B doesn't have to equal B times A. But, once established, the equation must hold throughout the story.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
"The Flat-Heeled Muse", Horn Book Magazine, April 1, 1965
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Hogfather
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
On Fairy-Stories
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
LLOYD ALEXANDER
A Visit with Lloyd Alexander
Fantasy is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Sublime Object of Ideology
Do not confuse fantasy with imagination: the former consumes itself in daydreaming, the latter stimulates creativity in the arts and in the sciences.
FAUSTO CERCIGNANI
attributed, Simply Transcribed: Quotations from Fausto Cercignani