“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.”
1836
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
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Nathaniel Hawthorne 128
American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879) 1804–1864Related quotes

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Source: Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 17.
“Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.”
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
How do we use feeling?
How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

Source: The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang-Tzu
Context: How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.
A Voice from the Attic (1960)