“We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”
David Foster Wallace book The Pale King
Source: The Pale King
“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”
— Don DeLillo, book White Noise
Source: White Noise (1984)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy c…" by Don DeLillo?
Don DeLillo101
American novelist, playwright and essayist 1936Related quotes
“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”
George Eliot book Adam Bede
Source: Adam Bede (1859)
Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
Mrs. Alving, Act II
Ghosts (1881)
Context: I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer
Captain Roadstrum to Bjorn, on planet Valhal, also known as Lamos, in Ch. 2
Space Chantey (1968)
Context: I do not understand your custom in this, but we do not intend to fight until all of us are dead. We desire very much that none of us be dead. And we will fight till all of you are dead only if it is absolutely necessary.
“The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”
Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood
Source: Norwegian Wood
“When we dead awaken. … We see that we have never lived.”
Henrik Ibsen When We Dead Awaken
Irene, in Act II
When We Dead Awaken (1899)
“And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old.”
Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
Fragment 88
Numbered fragments
P. D. Ouspensky book Tertium Organum
Tertium Organum (1922)
Context: Generally speaking, the significance of the indirect results may very often be of more importance than the significance of direct ones. And since we are able to trace how the energy of love transforms itself into instincts, ideas, creative forces on different planes of life; into symbols of art, song, music, poetry; so can we easily imagine how the same energy may transform itself into a higher order of intuition, into a higher consciousness which will reveal to us a marvelous and mysterious world.
In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity in the most diverse directions.