APAvar: Ruefle, Mary (2017). On Imagination. Sarabande Books. Link: https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/969438776
page 5:
I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. “The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.”
I am going to tell you now, before I begin, what my conclusion is to my thoughts on the imagination: I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.
page 11:
... it is an act of imagination to forgive your enemy and regard him with compassion.
The imagination is my daimon because it is my best friend and my worst enemy. It is my twin because I am my own best friend and my own worst enemy.
pages 23 - 24:
I asked the poet Michael Burkard about the imagination and he had this to say: “The imagination is more like the moon than the sun because it is dependent on another thing and exists in no pure state by itself .... It needs an openness to whatever is there at the moment and to not reject whatever is there because of any formulaic concept from out of the past. You can colonize a reader the way you can colonize a country. The imagination is not a privileged act; everyone engages in it. .... Even memory is an act of imagination, you never tell the same story twice, not even to yourself.”
pages 27 - 28:
... One way to look at it is to say they (young students) are interested in the future, and, having a very difficult and limited kind of future, I am not much interested in it, while at the same time I am more and more interested in the present moment, and I don’t mean the general state of affairs this month, I mean the bug walking across my lettuce leaf. I told this to my oldest friend, a woman I have known for forty-five years, and she said, “I know what you mean, Mary, but it’s not that way at all, it’s actually quite different, and the implications are far greater. It’s that other people have never been interested in the things that interest you, and you understand that now, but when you were younger you didn’t understand it at all, so you didn’t feel isolated, but now that you understand it you feel isolated, and you are.” This friend of mine, she has always been wiser than I am. I knew at once that she was right. So what is this thing I am interested in? My daimon, the imagination, of course. .... All I can tell you is that at long last I am myself and free, even if isolated, and I am happy when I want to be and sad when I feel like it, and about the only thing that troubles me is knowing how many people on earth do not have that privilege, for some external reasons and for some internal ones, and to these I bow and for these I pray.
daimon: some defintions: