Quotes About Imaginary Play

“Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.”

— Joe Meno

“A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.”

— Cyril Connolly

“Aleksar Greene was a boy I used to play with. He was my imaginary friend.”

— Shawn Lukas

“When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other.”

— Rita Rudner

“A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!”

— Christie Silvers

“I had a good time that night, too," Michael said, "but I kept thinking, This is forever. This is forever. You will have this good time again and again, a million times over, until it will be like a play in which you and Laura and a few fugitive lives sit around an imaginary fire and talk and sing songs and love each other and sometimes throw imaginary brands at the eyes blinking beyond the circle of imaginary firelight. And then I thought - and this is where I sounded just like a real philosopher - And even when you admit that you know every line in the play and every song that will be sung, even when you know that this evening spent with friends is pleasant and joyful because you remember it as pleasant and joyful and wouldn't change it for the world, even when you know that anything you feel for these good friends has no more reality than a dream faithfully remembered every night for a thousand years - even then it goes on. Even then it has just begun.”

— Peter S. Beagle

“Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“-I'll play you a song.
Blake flexed his fingers and concentrated harder on the cardboard, moving his hands methodically over it's surface.
What do you say after an imaginary concert?
Livia watched as the song came to a close with his careful plucking a certain keys on the cardboard. She couldn't help but glance to see if the commuters were staring.
-I couldn't hear that, but your hands looked beautiful.
-Of course not. It's not plugged in.
Blake smiled, then watched as she didn't get his joke.”

— Debra Anastasia

“Here's what I think. We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seek with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then, for whatever reasons, we get it in our heads that we need to get that feeling- that intimacy- from a single someone else. We call if growing up. But really, when you take sex out of it, what we want is a companion. And we make that so damn hard to find.”

— David Levithan

“Since I've worked in film and television for so long, I've acquired the ability to let the version of the characters that lives in my mind make way for the living, breathing humans who are going to play them on screen. If you cast it right - and casting is about 80% of directing - they will eventually replace or exceed the imaginary image.”

— Mark Frost

“When I was a teenager, I continued to visit imaginary places by spending all my free time at our local community theater. Whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school.”

— Mary Pope Osborne

“Just as a vampire has no choice but to drink human blood, I have no choice but to kill people. My fate was already decided the moment I was born. I wasn't abused by my parents and scarred mentally. I have no ancestors that were murderers. I was raised in a very ordinary household. But whereas ordinary children play alone with imaginary friends and pets, I spent my time staring at imaginary corpse.”

— Otsuichi

“Can you imagine Simon as a kid? His imaginary friends probably never wanted to play with him.”

— Paula Abdul

“That's what's so great about my job. I get paid to do what got me in trouble in grade school space out and play with my imaginary friends. In terms of Isaac, when the time's right.”

— Jonathan Kellerman

“Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.”

— Alison Gopnik

“Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.”

— Alison Gopnik

“Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. The whole creation is but a dream; all phenomena are imaginary. You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist. These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. I warn my younger readers only to treat them as a game. The metaphysicians will have the last word and defy you to disprove their absurd propositions.”

— Winston S. Churchill

“I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.”

— Dan Brown

“Performers should realize they not only have to prepare themselves for concert purposes as far as memorizing their programs goes, but for the business of just walking out before the people ... . It is important to play before an imaginary audience too. Before I play in public I very often play a program three or four times as though I were seated before a actual audience.”

— Leonard Rose

“I started writing because I decided I was too old to play pretend in the backyard. Then I found that I could create those imaginary worlds on the page.”

— Veronica Roth

“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own ... You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.”

— George Eliot

“Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.”

— Margaret Halsey