Old Yarns

Through we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.

Hope Mirrlees, Lud-In-The-Mist (London: Gollancz, 2008; 1926), p. 47.

Fairy Paper

 Emily had discovered that she possessed this odd knack when she was six. By a certain movement of her eyes, which she could never describe, she could produce a tiny replica of the wallpaper in the air before her—could hold it there and look at it as long as she liked—could shift it back and forth, to any distance she chose, making it larger or smaller as it went farther away or came nearer. It was one of her secret joys when she went into a new room anywhere to “see the paper in the air.” And this New Moon paper made the prettiest fairy paper she had ever seen.

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon (London: Harrap Books, 1977; 1928), p. 50.

Phantoms and Monsters

André Gide, La symphonie pastorale (Paris: Gallimard, 1925; 1919), pp. 64-65:

ah! que la vie serait belle et notre misère supportable, si nous nous contentions des maux réels sans prêter l’oreille aux fantômes et aux monstres de notre esprit...
 
oh! life would be beautiful and our misery bearable if we were content with genuine evils without lending an ear to phantoms and monsters of our imagination...

My translation.

Memory is Imagination

Alain Robbe-Grillet interviewed by Shusha Guppy, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 91’, The Paris Review, 99 (1986):

INTERVIEWER
   Do you mean that memory is imagination, that we invent our own life in retrospect or indeed as we go along?
 
ROBBE-GRILLET
   Exactly. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer that records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling a memory is part of the same process. This is very clear in Proust: For him there is no difference between lived experience—his relationship with his mother, and so forth—and his characters. Exactly the same type of truth is involved.