Dreaming by the Book Quotes

“What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“We find ourselves contemplating at once the compositional surface on which motion occurs and the things that move on that compositional surface because imagining motion requires us to blur the distinction between figure and ground, as when passengers sitting in a stationary train feel themselves begin to fall through space when another train passes by.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“Because the practice of writing is, then, a laying down of flowers upon flowers, it may be regarded as an exteriorization of what the imagining mind does, and of what it was doing long before it invented this external form of itself.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“...because material composition so unquestionably entails motion (making a sculpture or a shield or a painting requires motion just as much as walking or horseback riding or rising from one's chair does), we may be predisposed to discover it in mental composition as well.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book