p.11 In The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953), M.H. Abrams famously describes a shift
in the eighteenth century and in the Romantic era from the notion of the imagination as a mirror of the external world to
its conception as an inward-directed "lamp" - a creative faculty that can illuminate the invisible world beyond perceived
reality.
p.65 Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature,
or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that
they desire escape from the region of law.
p.65 The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more
than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a
little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms - which is the
nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products
of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case,
Law has been diligently at work.
p.67 For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether five, or
fifty, or seventy-five.
p.68 The best thing you can do for your fellow... is - not to give him things to think
about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.
