“We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire ...”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)