"Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?"
"Sounds like a Japanese game show."
Kat straightens her shoulders. "Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer."
Okay: "World government... no cancer... hover-boards."
"Go further. What's the good future after that?"
"Spaceships. Party on Mars."
"Further."
"Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere."
"Further."
"I pause a moment, then realize: "I can't."
Kat shakes her head. "It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.

You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.

How can you read this? There’s no pictures!”
“Well, some people use their imagination.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

It was the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing.

This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone — other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands — but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

Those who lack imagination have no choice but to base their conclusions on the reality they see around them. But on the other hand, those who are imaginative have a tendency to build fortified castles they have designed themselves, and to seal off every window in them.

The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you — the ability to imagine.

Imagination is better than knowledge.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.

You imagination is more important than your knowledge.

Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among my friends to protect me against my own lack of sophistication. I don't mind. I suspect that I am never quite as unsophisticated as they think I am, but I don't mind.

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