As quoted in Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, Chapter 1: 'Wedded Bliss'; translated by Lin Yutang in The Wisdom of China and India (1942), p. 968
Variant translation:
Life passes like a spring dream without a trace.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), p. 156
事如春梦了无痕。
“Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.”
“Without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes.”
Address to the United Nations (28 August 1954); as quoted in The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations (1993) by Lewis D. Eigen and Jonathan Paul Siegel, p. 698
Quote from her letter to her friend Mallarmé 1882; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 160
after her visit to Italy
1881 - 1895
Page 101
Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 (2005)
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 4 “Hearing” (p. 180)
“A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.”
Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
As quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132
Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50
“Desire to sleep has vanished now,
Spring has arrived in the night
In the wake of a storm.”
Source: Gertrude (1910), p. 164
Context: The south winds roars at night,
Curlews hasten in their flight,
The air is damp and warm.
Desire to sleep has vanished now,
Spring has arrived in the night
In the wake of a storm.
The Golden Violet - title poem - introduction
The Golden Violet (1827)
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope.
Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything.
