c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
My dreams had to be His dreams, the ones He placed in my heart. They couldn't be the ones I thought I should have, or needed for the purpose of making other people like me.
— Stormie Omartian, Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Dreams are nervy things—all it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die. 
— Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.
— John Connolly
. . . and I don’t expect him to suborn his life into mine any more than I would change my dreams for him. We’re not one soul, one being, however much we love each other.
— Ann Aguirre, Aftermath
It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confessAn unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akinIn missing each that salutory reinOf reason, and the grinding will of man.
— Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Something about Bekka and Haylee reminded her of Candace's line between ingenious and insane. Ingenuity inspired their dreams, and insanity gave them the courage to pursue them. It was something Melody wanted for herself.
— Lisi Harrison, Monster High
if you just go on dreaming then it stays a dream and becomes stale and dead. But first to dream and then to do isn't that the way to make a dream come true
— Meindert DeJong
...I got to chase my dream for a while, see what it's like, but this—" He stood and swept his arms wide. "This, and my family, is worth any price.
— J.L. Langley
What do you need in the New Year? You need a dream; your dream needs an action; and your action needs right thinking! Without right thinking, you can have only unrealised dreams!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A dream isn't worth living if you don't have friends to live it with.
— Danielle Johnson
But no-one came here to live an ordinary life. Despite what our somnambulistic, mythless society society tells us — a place stuffed to the gilders with unawake, unthinking folk ruled by shoulds, oughts and have-tos; people who have no understanding of themselves; individuals afraid to acknowledge, let alone live their dreams — you came here to weave your unique essence and vision into the world, thus rendering it magnificent, both for yourself and others.
— Thea Euryphaessa, Running Into Myself
The heartbeat is an irregular bell tolling; the footprints create ammonite patterns in the snow; they spiral in serpentine undulations, toward a complicated centre of mass, forming a beautifully inscribed hieroglyph, the earth acting as papyrus. It’s all signs and symbols; reading the emotions of another is an art, and tonight she lacks the imagination needed in order to be creative. Bewitching to behold, wings tucked neatly into the back of a loose summer jacket; his bare feet, dusky and dusty, tumble languidly toward her, over the soft crumbling ground. Dawn finds her dreams more beautiful to inhabit than reality. To her it becomes more real than the bed sheets she’s pulling close to her chest. As he approaches, she continues to watch the invocation of her desire. Wherever he steps the snow flees, it’s as if spring flowers from the very tips of his toes. She holds her breath as he slips his hand into hers, leading her away from the top of the hill on which they are standing. They don’t follow the path, instead they tread boldly over willow roots, twigs and fern leaves. Looking upwards, in order to see the colour of the sky, Dawn crosses her fingers for a shade of blue.
— Curtis Ackie, Waking Dawn
A blind man's world is bounded by the limits of his touch
—  an ignorant man's world by the limits of his knowledge: a great man's world by the limits of his vision.
And the pebbles fight each other as rocks/And my father bends among them/Two hands outstretching up to me/Not that I can hear.
— Joe Strummer, Rock Art & the X-Ray Style
I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
It’s those silly dreams that keep us alive.
— Lisa Shambrook
Take action on your inspired dreams
— Bernard Kelvin Clive, Your Dreams Will Not Die
I had a chat with May and I had a sweet talk with April but the lovely conversation that left me to ponder was the long talk I had with June. Mathematics came to tell me that May is 3, June is 4 and April is 5. ‘ This should have been the counting order’ Mathematics said to me, and added, if you add 3 and 5 you shall surely get 8 and if you find the mid of 8 you will get 4 which is June. Ask June why the disorder! So I quickly called June and asked, why have you change the order? June said, ‘my brother, in this era, you should least give men things which are in order. Let them ponder and put things in order and they will learn something better’. I had to ponder and wonder. Then June added, those who will ponder to know why I have change the order to be at the mid of the other shall get to the mid of the other and wonder why they are at the mid of the other and end the other in wonder but, those who would never see why they must ponder when they get to the mid of the other to know why I am there shall end the other in disorder. They shall end the other and wander in the end! I was quick to ask June, which other? June calmly said, the twelve disciples of the year. Disciples’? I asked. June quickly said, I mean months! In your journey of life, take a break as you journey and ponder over the journey; June concluded!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I guess I wonder what it would be like, to be living their live instead of mine.
— Corey Ann Haydu, OCD Love Story
If I would not do something – right now – I would never get to live my dreams in waiting.
— Gisela Hausmann "Naked Determination 41 Stories About Overcoming Fear"
It is hard to imagine the things you have never seen.
— Steven J. Carroll, All the Worlds of Men
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
— Ian Fleming
I'm going to make myself a promise right here and now. In Johnny's honor. I promise to live each day to the fullest. I promise to listen to my heart and then work through my fears to follow it. I promise to realize what my dreams are then take the steps necessary to make them a reality. I promise to be trut to me. Not what someone else wants me to be, but what I want.
— J. Sterling, Chance Encounters
My goals may seem impossibly far-fetched when really they're not. Break them down into steps and see how I accomplish great things. I can easily reach from A to B. I can manage from B to C. I can then make it from C to D. And so eventually, I will find my way from A to Z.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Dreams are fulfilled at the right.Be patient and wait for the fulfillment of your dreams.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If you really want it, then you'll make your dream happen.
— Mitch Albom
Let the world know your dreams, my friend; realise them!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
May your dreams be larger than mountains and may you have the courage to scale their summits.
— Harley King
Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.
— Erin Morgenstern
But a small part of him also knew that the reason he'd never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn't match up to his dreams.
— Jennifer E. Smith, You Are Here
Because when everyone dreams, but only a few realize their dreams, that makes cowards of us all.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
But [Everett] and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
We chase dreams and embrace shadows.
— Anatole France
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
On DreamsOnly one thing supersedes the importance of thinking about a better tomorrow. It's taking action today.
— Vincent Lowry
I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
If we write our dreams and goals down, we dramatically increase our odds of realization. If we share them with others, they become potent and alive.
— Kristin Armstrong
Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories?
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Vampires and humans; we are all monsters in our own way at the end of a dream, or a nightmare.
— Cameron Jace
Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.
— Natalie Babbitt, Kneeknock Rise
You can stretch to your fullest in this land, Emma, and not touch any edges. There's no dream too big for the wilderness. I'd hate to see it tamed and carved up into little fiefdoms.
— Alice Valdal, Her One and Only
Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unseen. And the palette of dreams. You can almost taste the colours, they seem as words on the tip of the tongue, unsayable as pomegranate seeds, unsayable as thick cream, the darkness of such a thick cream. This is why I am obsessed with dreams. They know what we cannot. Night after night they try and tell us the impossible. Dreams are secret and closed, and also contain everything, gushing, splayed open. Dream suitcases, carpetbags, hold-alls. They influence us secretly and they draw me to travel to nowhere, to beauty’s passage, through halls of mirrors where I know I am not myself, I know I am sublime. 
— Shawna Lemay
what is love? love is you!
— Sonia Dea Octalia
Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.
— Dale Turner
What wonderful things dreams are! They can make you be anything you want and take you anyplace in the world.
— Harry Bernstein, The Golden Willow: The Story of a Lifetime of Love
In this world of dreams, drifting off still more; and once again speaking and dreaming of dreams. Just let it be.
— Ryōkan
The miracles of our dreams lie beneath our foot soles -- in each and every tiny step we take as we journey to the stars… I reckon the destination isn’t the only miracle.
— Besa Kosova
I'm so glad you're here, Anne,' said Miss Lavendar, nibbling at her candy. 'If you weren't I should be blue…very blue…almost navy blue. Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy. One wants real things then. But you don't know this…seventeen never knows it. At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way... You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.
— Nikki Gemmell, The Bride Stripped Bare
The ground was so far below him, he could barely make it out through the grey mists that whirled around him, but he could feel how fast he was falling, and he knew what was waiting for him down there. Even in dreams, you could not fall forever. He would wake up in the instant before he hit the ground, he knew. You always woke in the instant before you hit the ground.
— George R.R. Martin
I sleep lightly and tread to keep my head out of the sea of dreams.
— David Anthony Durham, Acacia: The War with the Mein
Ah, but dreams cannot be captured with promises," he said. "Like water, they elude our grasp. But water is the staff of life. I believe your dream will come true if only because you will not compromise on it and let it go too lightly.
— Mary Balogh, Slightly Tempted
Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
I was told once by some country people that a magician should never tell his dreams because the telling will make them come true. But I say that is great nonsense.
— Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
I did it again. Lying guilty in a hotel room for a woman I will fail for.
— J.M. August
You will never be satisfied until you are completely satisfied with God.
— Jerry Kinard
Dreams alone with no acts toward achieving them are useless: no dreams at all is a condition of the pathetic.
— Jonas Samuelle
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then
— Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166]
— Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams
So long as breath remains in our lungs, untapped potential lies inside us, waiting to be released. The reason we are still alive is that we are carrying something inside us that this generation needs. That’s why we’re not yet in heaven.
— Wayne Cordeiro
and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928,
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
أَعيشُ عَلى فُتاتِ أَحْلامٍI live on remnants of dreams
— Khaled Ibrahim
(Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
— William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt
The Kammerlicht: Explanations of the Impressions Left Upon Various and Sundry Natures by Dreams as Interpreted According to Tribe, and of the Numbers to be Staked in Lotteries in Conformity with the Meanings of Said Dreams .. says … there are eight ‘tribes’ of dreams and of the eight only the fifth is genuine. Tribe 8 are dreams emanating directly from evil spirits. Tribe 7 are dreams granted to the virtuous as direct revelations. Tribe 6 are dreams from roots planted in disease (fever and such). Tribe 5 are dreams that come to those who have taken no food before retiring and are of a healthy & tranquil disposition.
— Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!
— H.C. Artmann, Contemporary Surrealist Prose
No harm," he said as he danced on, cutting the air. Only now, the snowflakes began to bleed as he cut them. Battle of white and scarlet..."Oto-san, what can I do?" I wept in the dream, my tears freezing to my cheeks."Dance," he said, his face still and calm, his blade whistling through the air. Blood flew from the tip of the sword, painting characters of death and disaster across the white ground.Dancing.
— David Kudler, Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale
The world is ruled by such dreams, dreams of impassioned hearts, and improvisations of warm lips, not by cold words linked in chains of iron sequence, --- not by logic. The heart with its passions, not the understanding with its reasoning, sways, in the long run, the actions of mankind.
— William Kirby
Dreams are deformed reflections of ourselves - less stable and more ungraspable than we are, upon which we in our turn assume the right to reflect upon and to determine.
— Roger Caillois
It was then that the seven-year-old said, “I am ready. What wonderful place will we visit tonight?” “I can take you wherever your dreams desire,” the calico pony replied on their first night together.
— Cheryl  Price
I can dream, though - can't I, for myself? Even if you have not the imagination or the soul?
— Barbara Scrupski, Ruslan: A Novel of Russia
Dreams show what a person takes to eternity—not a heaven but a chaos. Dreams provide a doorway that opens to the inner world of oneself. They show the intricate workings of the mind in ways that cannot be avoided or hidden.
— Belsebuub
Gilly had decided that this was a dream. The Witches' Carnival didn't exist in the real world. And the Gilly who existed in the real world was not brave or cunning enough to have done everything that she'd done in the past day. The real Gilly was not beautiful enough to be lying in bed beside a woman like Maggie. Gilly had decided this was a dream, and also that she'd let that real Gilly, deep asleep somewhere in the outskirts of Birmingham, wither away and never wake up.Already, Gilly could see herself arcing across the earth bright as a comet, moving too fast for the Ashleys and Tracyes, the thousand tiny insults and humiliations of the waking world, to ever catch.
— Kristopher Reisz, Tripping to Somewhere
Keith traced my face, traced my hands and traced my body as the crickets chirped a love song and I lost myself in his eyes that stroked my soul and punctured my heart, like a poison arrow in a shooting star
— Aishabella Sheikh, Lavinia
Returning to my dreams was like returning to home after a long time of being away - everything was exactly the same as you left it, except infinitely better.
— Aishabella Sheikh, Entwined
All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.
— Marcel Proust
I wish for adventure.I wish to matter.I wish for a home.
— Sophie Jordan, Sins of a Wicked Duke
Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
— Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.
— Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.
— Neil Gaiman, The Wake
Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight.
— Anna Kavan, Ice
What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?
— James Joyce, Ulysses
You should break away from unproductive routines that do not positively benefit you or make your life better.
— Tasha Hoggatt, What Makes You Great?
Dreams are real
—  dreams exert influence
Our work is directly proportional to the distances our dreams travel across, as force (power) is a constant factor
— Israelmore Ayivor
All that you have been is but a small part, a very mere bit of the potential of your life.
— Jennifer DeLucy
In everyone’s life, there is a line between reality and dreams; but poets don’t have that line.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
When your dream dies, create another dream; don’t waste your time to resurrect the dead one! Remember that you are mortal and don’t stuck on one dream! Give other dreams a chance! Be just! Remember, you are mortal and your time is very short!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The jangle of the telephone rousted Matt out of a deep sleep. He never dreamed. Dreams were too messy.
— Peggy Webb, The Mona Lucy
Man needed to dream. Yes, he needed to believe in illusions, to aspire to something more than the miserable, hostile life that suffocated him.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky
If a man has lost everything he has but his dreams, it means that he has still everything!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Every path we take in life, we make the decision to pursue a dream. We travel the path of our dreams on a mental path of a narrow bridge; we must stay focused on our goal and not fear, lest we lose our balance of purpose and fall.
— Ellen J. Barrier
The debris of her married life was enough to sever the tie between reality and dreams, the fine line between desire and temptation. Where did she draw the line? When did she admit defeat and surrender?
— Callie Hunter, Still Searching: Lost and Found
Love and trust are so powerful. They can literally change the fate of a person.
— Tasha Hoggatt
You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I'll be very glad to be a song and dance man.
— Gene Kelly
People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don't really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn't mean concentrating on what you don't have, it's positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.
— Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now
My dreams were all my own
—  I accounted for them to nobody
Edward: You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.
— Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf
Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.
— Zhuangzi
He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
World peace, true love, and happily-ever-afters amount to wasted wishes, failed endeavors, and most precious dreams.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Don't allow the fear of falling stop you from pursuing your dream. Prepare. Practice. Pray. Jump! It's through the fall that you'll realize you can to fly.
— Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried:  A Memoir
A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
— Jesse Owens, Jesse, A Spiritual Autobiography
Do you truly believe in the worthiness of your dreams? Do you truly think they are worth the consistent effort required to make them manifest? Once you truly believe, nothing can stop you but yourself, for such belief is the same power which creates and maintains all existence.
— Stephen Richards
Into the day as by dream I swim To the music of nourished meaning.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987
Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?
— Iain Banks
You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape
I imagined my first night alone in bed with my stranger. I conjured our future years together unhampered by worries about money or officialdom. We would enjoy the day, the night, a smile, a word, a kiss, a glance. All lovely thoughts. All pointless dreams.
— Lisa See, Peony in Love
You can create sense out of nonsense, something out of nothing. You can create wealth out of dearth, viable ventures out of turbulent adventures. You can create mercies out of miseries. You can create tomorrow’s peace out of today’s crisis.
— Ikechukwu Joseph
I could never understand what was going on in my dreams I couldn’t control the happenings, it’s like I just stood there glued to the ground watching everything around me move and evolve into different scenarios. I was a ghost of myself watching life unravel before my own eyes...
— JaszCab.
There's nothing to took forward to any more if you don't have dreams," he said. "Because dreams are goals and John might have run out of goals. So he died.
— Melina Marchetta
The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence — yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.
— António R. Damásio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
— Titus Lucretius Carus
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Believe in your dreams and when people doubt you, prove them wrong.
— Sky Diamond
Strange dreams are better than no dreams at all.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
May your dreams be gifts from the gods and may you open them with excitement and pleasure.
— Harley King
The greatest and most blessed thing in the Germanic life is the mythical, sensitive, yet strong, awakening. The fact is that we have again begun to dream our own primal dreams.
— Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century
An alder tree can't become an oak at will. A maple can't pick up its roots like legs, and stride, step by powerful step, along the shore to find the sun. And everything that ever said otherwise--all those years of school, and the plays and moving pictures that promise you can be someone else, something more--they were all lies.
— Emily Whitman, Wildwing
The lines of fate on my hand, once so bright, faded into echo.The memory of his face in my dreams, once so luminous passed into shadow.
— Farrah Naseem
Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams!
— Peter    James, Heaven Can You Hear Me?
Dreams are one treasure that God has bestowed on everyone without any discrimination.
— Jyoti Arora
Screw technicolor, red, and foreign languages. I dream in status updates.
— Fierce Dolan
Fate had a cruel sense of humor. It had been all his fault, anyway, whatever Mick or Gillia told him. Careless preoccupation and utter stupidity. Boyhood ignorance and negligence. He was only getting what he deserved, over and over again, for the rest of his life. If only in his dreams.
— V.S. Carnes
I took a deep breath. "Are you free tonight?" 	 There was a long, pregnant pause. "What about the man in the dream?" he finally asked. "There is no man in the dream.
— Richelle Mead, Succubus Dreams
Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.
— E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales
The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.
— Jorge Luis Borges
In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old - I don't think I'd started school yet - when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing which had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream. As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I'd bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn't seen it for a year or more - I don't think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake.When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled.'But what's scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.'I shook my head, meaning that the doll I'd owned - and barely remembered - had never scared me. 'But it was very scary,' I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying.My mother looked at me, baffled. 'But it's not scary,' she said gently. I'm sure she was trying to make me feel better, and thought this reasonable statement would help. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears.Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn't explain. Now I think - and of course I could be wrong - that what upset me was that I'd just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn't share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming. ("My Death")
— Lisa Tuttle, Best New Horror 16
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
— Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps
For a long time, my subconscious rested in a dark place, ticking through memories like a jukebox selecting a record...
— Chelsie Shakespeare, The Pull
Yet 'Reality' is just whatever illusion we believe in
— Fola, The Seed
Your subconscious is a powerful and mysterious force which can either hold you back or help you move forward. Without its cooperation, your best goals will go unrealized; with its help, you are unbeatable.
— Jenny Davidow, Embracing Your Subconscious: Bringing All Parts of You into Creative Partnership
I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.
— Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs
Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.”And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water…I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “Yes, that’s how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’”. I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness. ... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve. ... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream. ... in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church. [p. 247]
— Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds
He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed. ...
— Adolfo Bioy Casares, Diary of the War of the Pig
The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.
— Stephen King
Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead.
— Steve Rasnic Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.
— Iain Banks, The Player of Games
She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227]
— Anne Lamott, Imperfect Birds
I must break out......start a new life...been here for years...might be getting into a rut...something a bit more exciting...more adventurous...something with more of a challenge...There's not much opportunity for self-advancement in toilets...
— Raymond Briggs, Gentleman Jim
... the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul--the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]
— Kim Edwards, The Lake of Dreams
Cordy slept late, awakening only when the noises of the house and the insistent sunlight became to obvious to be believably incorporated into her dreams any longer.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
That we don't remember the beginning or the ending of dreams is our unconscious reminding us that it's all about the process.
— S. Kelley Harrell
When you got no future, Billy, you got no past - no dreaming to guide you into the future. Gotta have your dreaming of you get lost...
— Gary Taaffe, Four Small Stones
I don't want to become obsessed with work or money or change any of the values I have now. I don't have reason to believe that I ever should change, as much as I have this feeling of urgency to pursue my dreams...
— Tanya Kimberly Orme
Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.
— Mike Carey, The Naming of the Beasts
I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?
— Bridie Clark, Because She Can
Maybe, life is a kind of waking dream.Maybe, it's a double-dream with a false awakening.Maybe, the dream only becomes lucid and truly luminous given the fuller perspective of life after one's own wake.Maybe, the pictures never stop.Doesn't the existence of dreams and higher consciousness during the years of blackouts of a lifetime, whether longer or shorter, give us a valid premise to hope that another highly spiritual state may await our passing?
— David B. Lentz, For the Beauty of the Earth: A Novel
I wanted so much when I was young. I was an endless abyss of want, of need of desperate dreams for myself that defied logic. The promise of what was to come hung like rings around the moon on clear autumn nights; the future was unmistakeable. It was always there, glistening in the dark and suggesting that life was little more than climbing a ladder into the sky, where I could reach up with one hand and secure everything that I had ever hoped for in my grasping fingers.Oh, I dreamed.And they are not easy to give up, these dreams.
— Nicole Baart, Summer Snow
There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work.
— Michael Gruber, The Good Son
There's no heaven as I had known before. It's just a great universe which is available to be enjoyed by souls who dream about it.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
It was a time of dark dreams. They washed in like flotsam on the night tide, slipping beneath doorways and window latches, rising through the streets and hills; and the little fishing-town of Scarlock foundered deep.
— J.A. Clement, On Dark Shores: The Lady
I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after."It's about feeling," Camille had insisted.I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.
— Stuart Dybek, I Sailed with Magellan: Stories
I have the mind to do so many fields, careers, jobs, and hobbies; but I have the heart to do few fields of work, careers, jobs, and hobbies
— Temitope Owosela
Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
When I am at my work each dayIn the fields so fresh and greenI often think of riches and the way things might have beenBut believe me when I tell you when I get home each dayI'm as happy as a sandboy with my wee cup of tay
— Patrick McCabe, The Dead School
You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!
— Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers
The Indians did not like to see anything odd -- a white squirrel, for instance. . . . They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil. . . . And the Indians put a great deal of faith in dreams.
— Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary
In another world,' he said, lowering his voice; I remember... was it not in another world, in a life which was not in thrall to sleep and its phantoms?...
— Charles Nodier, Smarra & Trilby
The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
If man doesn't dream, he has nothing.""A man whose dreams will never come true still has nothing.
— Joel Goldman, Motion To Kill
How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.
— Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Legal Study
There's wall of agony between dreams and reality.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Walking down the path of dreams, inner-self and listening to your heart are all different names given to your hidden scripts. 
— Santosh Kalwar
New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.
— Ralph Ellison
They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.
— C. G. Jung