We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. If there is no change, there is no imaginative act. If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance -- an explosion -- of unusual images, then there is no imagination.
-- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. E. and F. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), p. 109. Quoted in "Charles Simic's Insomnia" by J. Heath Atchley, Literature & Theology, Vol. 17. No. 1, March 2003, p. 50.
