dreams Quotes

“ ‘While I’m gone,’ Gansey said, pausing, ‘dream me the world. Something new for every night.’ ”

“Lust and dull slumber and the lazy hours
Have well nigh banished virtue from mankind.
Hence have man’s nature and his treacherous mind
Left their free course, enmeshed in sin’s soft bowers.
The very light of heaven hath lost its powers
Mid fading ways our loftiest dreams to find;
Men jeer at him whose footsteps are inclined
Where Helicon from dewy fountains showers.
Who seeks the laurel? who the myrtle twines?
‘Wisdom, thou goest a beggar and unclad,’
So scoffs the crowd, intent on worthless gain.
Few are the hearts that prize the poet’s lines:
Yet, friend, the more I hail thy spirit glad!
Let not the glory of thy purpose wane!”

“Still, the image haunted his dreams throughout the night: a lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back.”

“It will go on after me, for this Company is an idea. It is a dream – a dream that is much older than you or I and only slightly younger than the world: Men must help one another in dangerous times and places.”

“It’s also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in my life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.”

“‘Dive for dreams,’ he used to say, quoting the e. e. cummings poem. ‘And live by love.’”

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

“In the real world
as in dreams,
nothing is quite
as it seems.”

“I was proud of Father for wanting to be a dragon again, and even prouder of the fact that he was now so close to achieving his ambition to fly. I was just sorry that we had not been able to combine his more lofty goals with the more ordinary dream of seeing Mother.”

“We chase wild dreams and long for all that eludes us, when the greatest joys are within our grasp, if we can only recognize them.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“She soared with the anticipation of dreams she never knew she could have, of learning English, of supporting her family, of someday buying a tiny house.”

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Why are we such fools—such tragic fools?”

“The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”

“It seemed as if New England was a region given up to the dreams of fancy and the unrestrained experiments of innovators.”

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.”

“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”

“Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!”

“Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time.”

“I’d have a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books, and I’d write out of a magic inkstand, so that my works should be as famous as Laurie’s music. I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle—something heroic, or wonderful—that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.”

“As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else’s.”

“Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions. When you start rethinking your targets, making up excuses, and letting yourself off the hook, you are giving up on your dreams!”

“Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.”

″Give yourself permission to dream. Fuel your kids’ dreams, too.Once in a while, that might even mean letting them stay up past their bedtimes.″

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I came upon a certain place with a den, and I lay down to sleep. I fell asleep and dreamed. In my dream, I saw a man clothed with rags standing in a certain place, with his face turned from his own house. In his hand he held a book, and he bore a great burden upon his back.”

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

“For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams”

“The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.”

“I feel no malice toward this girl. I don’t even envy her. Watching, I am simply emptied, and in the dream I want to cry out, because she is something I can never be, some possibility in my life that can never be fulfilled.”

“If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep”

“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

“And to every kid in Georgetown and in all ‘the Gardens’ of the world: your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be the roses that grow in the concrete.”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“It’s the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.”

“You have to dream big before doing big”

“But it was all a dream; no Eve soothed my sorrows nor shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.”

“Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.
Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.”

“That’s why he sometimes shows us things, you know- to tell us that this too is in His hands.”

“Start with a strong passion, use what you have in your hands and build your dream. The builder builds a mansion by putting one block at a time.”

“Also, the car headlights can only see 20 metres ahead but can take you to a 1000 miles journey.
Meaning start small but think big.”

“It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim “You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself” made clear sense. And I add, “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

“I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

“You don’t need to have it all before you start, you don’t need to know everything, you don’t need to understand fully how it works and you don’t need to be sure or assured of the future.”

“Dreams are not born of indifference, laziness, or lack of ambition.”

“That’s what I’m living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.”

“Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that “Stanley Yelnats” was spelled the same frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was an only child, as was every other Stanley Yelnats before him.

All of them had something else in common. Despite their awful luck, they always remained hopeful. As Stanley’s father liked to say, “I learn from failure.”

But perhaps that was part of the curse as well. If Stanley and his father weren’t always hopeful, then it wouldn’t hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed.”

“Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life”

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“[P]eople are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

“Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something--he could not grasp what-that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.”

“Friends, it’s not about the goal or the dream you have. It’s about who you become on your way to that goal.”

“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

“Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60’s. Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted.”

“When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.”

“Don’t be self-conscious,” he whispered in my ear. “If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I’m not ashamed of it.”

“The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream.”

“You get to tell the truth about what you love and who you are and what you dream about.”

“I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”

“Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly feared losing.”

“I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings. I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms.”

“She hadn’t realized how much she’d needed a dream, but it had transformed her, changed her from poor motherless and abandoned Tully to a girl poised to take on the world. The goal made her life story unimportant, gave her something to reach for, to hang on to.”

“How do you keep hold of a dream like that?”

“With both hands.”

“He bent down on one knee and whispered to me, ‘If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from when you go to sleep at night, just look around. This is where they are made.‘”

“Maybe without your own dreams, you are left to live other people’s dreams?”

“He talked about how happy he was to be a father, and how much he looked forward to ending his operator career and raising his newborn son, Kai.”

″... Now sit back, open your eyes, and be prepared to dream.”

“Our goddess of the moon is gifted with magic, with power over the dead. She could banish the dreams, if she wished. She did not.”

“For two bits I’d shove out of here. If we can get jus’ a few dollars in the poke we’ll shove off and go up the American River and pan gold. We can make maybe a couple of dollars a day there, and we might hit a pocket.”

“Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

“Life, what is it but a dream?”

“I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the
thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

“‘It’s the home I’ve always dreamed of,’ Theodora said. ‘A little hideaway where I can be alone with my thoughts. Particularly if my thoughts happen to be about murder or suicide or—‘”

“If you can’t dream big, ridiculous dreams, what’s the point in dreaming at all?”

“For it is one thing to declare one’s love for someone and quite another to accept that loving that person requires sacrificing one’s dreams.”

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness.

“I thought it was a dream at first,” Conor said […], “but then I kept finding leaves when I woke up and little trees growing out of the floor. I’ve been hiding them all so no one will find out.”

“Such evidently small incidents . . . render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

“It’s more important to grow your income than cut your expenses. It’s more important to grow your spirit that cut your dreams.”

“It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

“The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily.”

“Dreams are what keep a man going.”

“The ups and downs, the dreams and struggles, had all been part of the journey, she realized—a journey that led to a cattle ranch near a town called King, where she had fallen in love with a cowboy named Luke.”

“My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my friends under the apple trees.”

″ I stand in awe of anyone who hatches a dream and who shows the guts to hang tough, all alone, and see it through to reality.”

“But I don’t want him. I want someone else. It feels strange to have spent so much time wishing for something, for someone, and then one day, suddenly, to just stop.”

“I still fly a lot in my dreams, she told us, but I try to stay close to the ground. At my age, a fall can be pretty serious.”

“Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.”

“I was not sure what my laughter sounded like. ”

“Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness about him, his dream had had its usual effect: it had intensified the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.”

“Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.”

“...What you are is a force--a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream...You are life”

“None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.”

“Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, “I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”

“But this dream of yours, this dream of being able to defer. Such a thing would always have been beyond us to grant, even at the height of our influence. I’m sorry, I can see what I’m saying won’t be welcome to you. But you mustn’t be dejected.”

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

To surrender dreams — this may be madness.

“During my night I, having become lusty, wandered about in the midst of omens.”

″‘It’s not about the money. It’s about what I could do with it.‘”

“And there came out stars in the heavens, Like a … of heaven he fell upon me. I bore him but he was too heavy for me. He bore a net but I was not able to bear it.”

“Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life.”

“I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength here.”

“I saw him and was astounded. I loved him as a woman, falling upon him in embrace. I took him and made him my brother.”

“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

“My mother, I have seen another [dream. I beheld] my likeness in the street. In Erech of the wide spaces he hurled the axe, and they assembled about him.”

“I love you, Gabby, more than you’ll ever know. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a wife. You’re every hope and every dream I’ve ever had, and you’ve made me happier than any man could possibly be. I don’t ever want to give that up. I can’t.”

“rarely discusses his plans, he knows that whenever he talks about a dream, he uses a little bit of the energy from that dream in order to do so…A Warrior of the Light knows the power of words.”

“Soul is as free as the clouds in the sky, but he is committed to his dream. On his freely chosen path, he often has to get up earlier than he would like, speak to people from whom he learns nothing, make certain sacrifices.”

“I didn’t want to end up like my dad, living in the same house, in the same small town I’d grown up in, with the same people who had never dreamed their way out of here.”

“Walter: Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me – just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me — a big, looming blank space – full of nothing. Just waiting for me. But it don’t have to be.”

“When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer.”

“It was nothing like what I’d dreamed of when I was a little girl—what I had hoped for myself growing up. But it was the only life I had, and it was mine. The days of waiting around for someone else to ride in and save the day for me were over.”

“One day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.”

“The beautiful boy from my dreams turned out to be nothing more than a trickster. An illusion I was too blind to see through.”

“People will judge you and your dreams. They’ll tell you you’re crazy and try to convince you that mediocrity is the smarter choice and that’s because it’s easier if you buy into the same lie they have, that no one person can really make a difference and that life is about ‘growing up’ instead of working toward your personally authored, happily ever after.”

“I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.”

“My father and I were close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers...I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.”

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.”

“America allowed them to create a life they couldn’t have dreamed of in their home countries of Jamaica and Cuba.”

“People who neglect to make efforts or who don’t take any actions at all are always the ones who dream that someday they will suddenly become wildly successful.”

“When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?”

“The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

“I do not want you to waste your life in dreams, like your father.”

“Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams.”

“With Walter Scott, later, she became enamored of things historical, dreamed of studded leather chests, guardrooms, and troubadours…. At that time she worshiped Mary Stuart and felt an ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women.”

“In my dreams, I was always free. I was happy, and I was with him. (...) It was always heaven like this with Trace. My own piece of paradise within the burning inferno.”

“Don’t you know there are some souls that are constantly tormented? They need dreams and action, one after the other, the purest passions, the most frenzied pleasures, and it leads them to throw themselves into all sorts of fantasies and follies.”

“Dreams bore my fancy to that region where
She dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see.
’Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be
I looked on her, less haughty and more fair.
She took my hand, she said, ‘Within this sphere,
If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me:
I filled thy life with war’s wild agony;
Mine own day closed ere evening could appear.
My bliss no human thought can understand;
I wait for thee alone, and that fair veil
Of beauty thou dost love shall yet retain.’
Why was she silent then, why dropped my hand
Ere those delicious tones could quite avail
To bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?”

″So thank you, Justin. Sincerely. My very first kiss was wonderful. And for the month or so that we lasted, and everywhere that we went, the kisses were wonderful. You were wonderful.”

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”

“No one is ever satisfied where he is.”

“It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

“The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.”

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”

“Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.”

“I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”

“Kid, you’ll move mountains! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So get on your way!”

“To die, to sleep -
To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there’s the rub,
For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...”

“Are you sure
That we are awake? It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream.”

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

“That’s the thing about being the product of happily married parents. You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you’re entitled to live it.”

“Dreams are always crushing when they don’t come true. But it’s the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You’re always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it’s enough to break your heart.”

“When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitations, and the value of hard work and persistence.”

“Tough toenails, tiger. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And this is one: I’m going to tell it—but take care not to smile at any part of it.”

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me—
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

I allowed my mind to wander. I’ve found this to be a very effective way of passing the time; you take a situation or a person and start to imagine nice things that might happen. You can make anything happen, anything at all, inside a daydream.

“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that care nothing for hope or longing.”

“I[f] we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here,
While these visions did appear,
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding, but a dream.”

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”

“Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time.”

“We could live offa the fatta the lan’.”

“It ain’t no lie. We’re gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’.”

“They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.”

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”

“A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.”

They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

“We live as we dream--alone....”

“Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...”

“I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.”

“We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.”

“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams.”

But only in their dreams can men be truly free.

Only in their dreams can men be truly free. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.

Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams, and I’ll show you a happy man.

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

If you live in a past dream, you don’t enjoy what is happening right now because you will always wish it to be different than it is.

“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy.”

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

“You are, and always have been, my dream.”

“I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I’ve ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours. ”

“Once someone dreams a dream, it can’t just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can’t remember it, what becomes of it? It lives on in Fantastica, deep under earth. There are forgotten dreams stored in many layers. The deeper one digs, the closer they are. All Fantastica rests on a foundation of forgotten dreams.”

“Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can’t explain them, and those who haven’t known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice everything for a dream that can never come true.
Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people.”

“Say,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter?”

“National Socialism brought dream and conformism together into something satanic.”

“Yesterday, I had a dream... A dream I have had since long ago. In that dream, we had yet to turn 13. We were in a vast countryside, completely covered with snow. The lights of the houses extended far into the distance, a dazzling sight.”

“Instead, I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result. I promised that I would try to be brave about it, and grateful, and as uncomplaining as I could possibly be. I also promised that I would never ask writing to take care of me financially, but that I would always take care of it—meaning that I would always support us both, by any means necessary. I did not ask for any external rewards for my devotion; I just wanted to spend my life as near to writing as possible—forever close to that source of all my curiosity and contentment—and so I was willing to make whatever arrangements needed to be made in order to get by.”

“Then she cursed me comprehensively, my eyes, my mouth, every member of my body, and it was like a dream in the large unfurnished room with the candles flickering and this red-eyed wild-haired stranger who was my wife shouting obscenities at me.”

“It’s a dream, only a dream. That’s what I tell myself when I wake up […] But it felt so real. I put my fingers to my lips. They’re not swollen with kissing. I’m still whole. Pure.”

“Isabel listened as everyone listed more and more things they were looking forward to in the States. Clothes, food, sports, movies, travel, school, opportunity. It all sounded so wonderful, but when it came down to it, all Isabel really wanted was a place where she and her family could be together, and happy.”

“We are 93 million miles from the sun. 238 thousand miles from the moon. A moment from finding magic and one kiss away from reaching our dreams.”

“What power would Hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of Heaven?”

“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”

“Action is what converts human dreams into significance.”

“I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They’re just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I’m married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything’s wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I’m still me. And I’m still here. And that is truly terrible.”

“A dream requires a partner: commitment.”

“Dreams often come one size too big so that we can grow into them.”

“You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly... But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you... What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?”

“After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?”

“If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life.”

“His one dream now was to fall sick for two or three weeks . . . not fatally . . . just sick enough to be put in the hospital.”

“These people had probably always had a home right here in Raynesville. They’d all had the life I’d always dreamed about, stable and predictable.”

“There are a great many things that I wish to do, and don’t get to.”

“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

“Once I’d dreamed and breathed and thought in colour and light and shape.”

“To compensate for the difficulties in their lives, people spend a lot of their time daydreaming, imagining a future full of adventure, success, and romance. If you can create the illusion that through you they can live out their dreams, you will have them at your mercy.”

“I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”

“I had a dream about you. I was sitting on your couch, relating my succession of ideas on subconscious influence. I asked you what they meant, and you told me that free associations were a bad way to advance my political career.”

“I had a dream about you last night... you were a giant slinky and I watched you fall down the stairs.”

“I had a dream about you last night... Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream.”

“I had a dream about you last night. We stopped telling each other about our dreams when we realized we were still inside them.”

“I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people’s nightmares.”

“I had a dream about you last night... you were there.”

“Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and dreams and shadows, than with the actual world around me.”

“I had a dream about you last night. I could fly. I was going to use this power to impress you, but you were too heavy to carry, so I won you over with my personality instead.”

“I had a dream about you last night... I was a brick and you were a blanket. Damn that improbability drive.”

“Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”

“I had a dream about you last night... You replaced all the people in your life with kittens. It felt more like a prediction of the future.”

“But now that I see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”

“I had a dream about you last night.
We moved into a cabin in the countryside.
I couldn’t handle the spiders.
You couldn’t handle my drama.
I moved back to the city.”