“We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live if we were always this awake?”

— Terry Pratchett, book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Terry Pratchett796

English author 1948–2015

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 17 : Success Redefined, p. 199

“We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 261.

“But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be. That if we are living as we were this week, that we had to be awake with the people who are still dancing.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

You Shall Know Our Velocity! (2002)

“Machines, no matter how sophisticated, can only follow programs. If we sleepwalk through our lives, then we’re no better than machines. Only humans are capable of a job done well -- which means thinking about the consequences of our actions. A job done well pays the bills, but it also improves the lives of everyone around us.”

John Twelve Hawks book Spark

Spark (2014)

“We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“Unless we can trace our lineage to the original humans and find that we live where they lived, we are all international migrants. Furthermore, we are all wanderers. We symbolically carry our homes on our backs, like turtles, snails, and crustaceans—for the meanings and associations of home are always with us and affect our orientation in space and time, and how we negotiate our way through the world.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Home: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=CyShDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 7.

“Here's what I believe a soul is — at least this, I believe it's at least this. I believe that every kindness that we create in our lives, if it came because we were affected by a person we loved and lost, that person lives through that kindness. That's what a soul is.”

James Woods (1947) American film, stage and television actor

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 11 September 2006

“But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 208
Context: The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

“Because our lives are cowardly and sly,
Because we do not dare to take or give,
Because we scowl and pass each other by,
We do not live; we do not dare to live.”

James Stephens (1882–1950) Irish writer

"The Road", line 1, in Songs from the Clay (London: Macmillan, 1915) p. 97.

“We sleepwalk through our lives, because how could we live if we were always this awake?”

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