quotations about fantasy
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason ... On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy it will make.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
On Fairy-Stories
There are some people who can never see a little cloud of fantasy float across the horizon of their dreams without building a heavy castle in the air upon it, and bringing it to earth.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
interview, Publisher Weekly, January 31, 2011
I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
White Nights
Fantasy always occurs within the shadow of the real.
HAROLD SCHEUB
The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The child, so much more insecure than an adult, needs assurance that his need to engage in fantasy, or his inability to stop doing so, is not a deficiency.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
MAYA ANGELOU
Poems
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Everybody must have a fantasy.
ANDY WARHOL
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
My conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is an extension rather than a negation of reality. Ordinary tales about a castle ghost or old-fashioned werewolf are merely so much junk. The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness. This curiosity and sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic among the sensitive minority in question; and I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future--for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930
A study of fantasy is not a study of a flying carpet or twenty-league boots or whether Jonah was actually swallowed by the whale or not: it is, rather, a study that takes us to the very foundations of art, because fantasy is rhythm, the heartbeat of narrative production. When we move into the world of the storyteller, we are in the realm of fantasy, whether or not there is a talking crow, a disembodied human head, a monstrous dragon.
HAROLD SCHEUB
Story
No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment.
GENEEN ROTH
When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy
I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.
LAINI TAYLOR
Strange the Dreamer
The principal objective of fantasy is a poetic reorganization of the real, a tropic reinvention of the images of the real. To get caught up in the question of whether a given image is fantasy is to mistake the elephant's tail for the rest of the beast.
HAROLD SCHEUB
Story