“I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.”
Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
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Anna Akhmatova 99
Russian modernist poet 1889–1966Related quotes

Source: LSD : My Problem Child (1980), Ch. 1 : How LSD Originated
Context: I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition? At times I believed myself to be outside my body, and then perceived clearly, as an outside observer, the complete tragedy of my situation. I had not even taken leave of my family (my wife, with our three children had traveled that day to visit her parents, in Lucerne). Would they ever understand that I had not experimented thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, but rather with the utmost caution, and that such a result was in no way foreseeable? My fear and despair intensified, not only because a young family should lose its father, but also because I dreaded leaving my chemical research work, which meant so much to me, unfinished in the midst of fruitful, promising development. Another reflection took shape, an idea full of bitter irony: if I was now forced to leave this world prematurely, it was because of this lysergic acid diethylamide that I myself had brought forth into the world.

In an interview in Die Zeit, 24 Nov 1989
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
“Speak your dreams, no one climbs a mountain accidentally.”
Vanderbilt Commencement Address (2011)

“Why live life from dream to dream? And dread the day when dreaming ends.”
Source: Moulin Rouge!: The Splendid Book That Charts the Journey of Baz Luhrmann's Motion Picture

“I don't have dreams. How can I say it? I myself am a dream.”

The Ancestress (Spoken by Bertha, of Jaromir)
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

“As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

On a Boy's first Reading of "King Henry V", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); comparable to "I am the master of my fate", William Ernest Henley, Invictus (1875).