Quotes about dreams
page 12

“Rest against my heart. Let me watch over your dreams. And know that tomorrow morning, and every morning after that, you'll awaken next to someone who loves you.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Married By Morning

Love, Heart

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

Source: Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika

Pain, World

“… when the armed robber of unhappiness knocks over the Keebler cookie display of our complacency, and bangs the samurai sword of negativity on the checkout counter of our dreams, we must not be afraid to hurl the fruit cocktail can of hope.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Hope

“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

Beauty

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

“She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

Life, Pain, Time, Hurt

“They held each other and kissed and pushed each others' darkness into the corner, believing in each others' light, each others' dream.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Kiss, Light

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

Jonathan Franzen book Freedom

Source: Freedom

Freedom, Rage, Personality

“The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Life, Success

“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 87 (p. 314)

Men

“By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Understanding

“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

People, Books, Thinking

“Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

World, Personality

“But if one had everything one could ever need or want, what was left to dream of?”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: Then Comes Seduction

“Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.”

Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief

Source: The Gum Thief

Death

“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Book of Dreams (1961) Foreword
As misquoted in Night and Day (1989) by Jack Maguire, p. 221; Maguire does not cite his source, so this widely quoted variant appears to be an erroneous paraphrase of this published statement. It is not a direct quote from some other statement by Kerouac.
Variant: All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

World, Night

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”

André Breton book Manifestoes of Surrealism

Source: Manifestoes of Surrealism

Reality, Future

“See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

World

“… along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”

David Abram (1957) American philosopher, ecologist

Source: The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

World, Imagination, Tree, Animals

“I dreamed you were standing in this dark place and you touched these dead flowers and they lit up like they were electric or something. Electric lilies. Lighting up the Valley.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories

Flowers, Light, Dead

“Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize… Vienna waits for you.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Vienna.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)
Context: But you know you can't always see when you're right
You got your passion you got your pride
But don't you know only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

Imagination, Waiting

“A dream is the key that unlocks the mysteries of the waking world…”

Juliet Marillier (1948) New Zealand fiction writer

World

“People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

People

“In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

Henry Adams book The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Source: The Education of Henry Adams

Law, Nature

“What you dream, you can grow. Someone told me that, but I didn't believe it. I said I had nothing and that people with nothing are unable to dream. But I was wrong.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Green Witch

People

“In dreams lie responsibilities.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Variant: In dreams begins responsiblities.
Source: Kafka on the Shore

Lie

“I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines”

Joanne Harris book Chocolat

Source: Chocolat

“Do all you can to make your dreams come true.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Given

Grass

“I don't know myself, what to do, where to go… I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort… it's what the world offers… please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.”

William H. Gass book Omensetter's Luck

Source: Omensetter's Luck

Lie, Books, World

“Better to end this dream before it becomes a nightmare.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“No rest
without love,
No sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines
the final wish
is love.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Love, Angels, Sleep, Madness

“Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.”

Chuck Palahniuk Snuff

Source: Snuff

“To find riches is a beggar’s dream, but to find love is the dream of kings.”

Sidney Sheldon book Bloodline

Source: Bloodline

Love

“This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) French writer

“You’re not a morning person, are you? (Simone)
I’m a Dream-Hunter/demon. By my very nature I’m nocturnal. That big yellow ball in the sky offends me to the very core of my being. (Xypher)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Chaser

Nature, Personality

“I want you to have big dreams, big goals. I want you to strive to achieve them. But I don't want to see you beating yourself up every time you make a mistake.”

Kelley Armstrong The Gathering

Source: The Gathering

Time

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Author's Note, p. xi
Source: Life of Pi (2001)

Imagination, Support, Reality

“Each man dreams his own heaven.”

John Connolly The Book of Lost Things

Source: The Book of Lost Things

“Have your dream… What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: After the Quake

“all girls have dreams, even if our destinies are set.”

Lisa See book Peony in Love

Peony in Love

Girl

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Life, Hope, Soul, Reality

“May all your dreams but one come true, for what is life without a dream?”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Life

“It's like my whole life never happened,
When I see you, it's as if I never had a thought.
I know this dream, it might be crazy,
But it's the only one I've got.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Life

“If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.”

Ian McEwan book The Daydreamer

Source: The Daydreamer

Life, People

“And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Way

“Look. If I touch you with this hand, I can remember touching you, but I can't prove I ever did. If reality is nothing more than what is in our mind… then what is the difference between this world and a dream?”

Kaori Ozaki (1976) Japanese mangaka

Source: Immortal Rain, Vol. 1

World, Reality

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Love, Smile, Lovers, Loneliness

“My life flies away like a dream:
Why should I stay behind?”

Julia Golding (1969) British fiction writer

Source: Cat-O'nine Tails

Life

“Action alone is the tinder which ignites the map, the parchment, this scroll, my dreams, my plans, my goals, into a living force.”

Og Mandino book The Greatest Salesman in the World

Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 16 : The Scroll Marked IX, p. 93.
Context: I will act now. Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which carried its owner over even one inch of ground. Never has there been a parchment of law, however fair, which prevented one crime. Never has there been a scroll, even such as the one I hold, which earned so much as a penny or produced a single word of acclamation. Action alone is the tinder which ignites the map, the parchment, this scroll, my dreams, my plans, my goals, into a living force. Action is the food and drink which will nourish my success.
I will act now.

“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

(From an introductory speech at a session of the Académie Française, December 24, 1896)”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Source: Works of Anatole France

“You can never be upset with the people who forced you into your dream or up higher.”

Tyler Perry (1966) American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer, author, and songwriter

People

“I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

World, Heart

“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

Source: My Autobiography (p. 271 Simon and Schuster 1964 edition)

History

“The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Hope

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Imagination, History, Effort

“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”

Sigmund Freud book The Interpretation of Dreams

Source: The Interpretation of Dreams

“Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

“You can feel that he wants to own you - not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.”

Melissa Bank book The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Source: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Feeling

“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Reality, Dependency

“When our memories outweigh our dreams, it is then that we become old.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Memory

“We connect through our dreams. Like we could be a thousand miles apart and I'd still know you were there.”

Pete Hautman (1952) American children's writer

Source: The Big Crunch

“No, I'll dream another dream," he said. "I've made up so many things, now I'll just go into one. I'll be part of it.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Parting

“Why live life from dream to dream? And dread the day when dreaming ends.”

Baz Luhrmann (1962) Australian film director, screenwriter and producer

Source: Moulin Rouge!: The Splendid Book That Charts the Journey of Baz Luhrmann's Motion Picture

Life

“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Music, Silence, Parting

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Love, Communication, Personality

“I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Love, Hate

“A scattered dream that's like a far-off memory… a far-off memory that's like a scattered dream… i want to line the pieces up… yours and mine.”

Shiro Amano (1976) Japanese manga artist

Source: Kingdom Hearts, Vol. 2

Memory

“For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.”

Franz Kafka book The Metamorphosis

Source: The Metamorphosis

“Such Small Things:
For a long time there were only your footprints & laughter in our dreams & even from such small things, we knew we could not wait to love you forever.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Love, Laughter, Time, Waiting

“Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when again it's morning, they'll wash away.

Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen, Rue's song, p. 235
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Love, Forgetting

“I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love, World, Reality

“… A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Source: Complete Works

Art, Music

“Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

“But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Life

“I am going to love you now, slow and sweet, but when you come, I'm going to f*** you the way I need to. The way I've been dreaming about since the moment I saw you.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Dark Highlander

Love, Way

“When I dream, I dream of him.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“Freedom is the dream you dream
While putting thought in chains again”

Giacomo Leopardi Canti

Source: Canti

Freedom

“If the sky could dream, it would dream of dragons.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Fate's Edge

“Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Feeling, Reality

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Hunger, Art, Sleep, Loneliness

“… and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Double Life

Love

“Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Reality

“Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who's dreaming who?”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Animal Man, Vol. 2: Origin of the Species

Universe

“At first, being with Sebastian was like being in the middle of the best dream I'd ever had - but now it mostly feels exhausting. I'm up one minute and down the next; questioning what I say and do. Even questioning my sanity.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

Feeling, Question

“He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Idea, Waiting

“No rest without love,
no sleep without dreams of love-
be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines,
the final wish is love
-cannot be bitter, cannot deny,
cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Love, Angels, Sleep, Madness

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Art and Lies

Death, Angels

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”

Jean Genet (1910–1986) French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist

Youth

“making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Decision, Strong

“Sometimes when things are particularly bad, my brain will give me a happy dream.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Happiness

“What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

from the play "God".
Without Feathers (1975)

Guy

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience
Context: Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.

“he knew that a part of his life was complete and that whatever path he chose, he would experience the ache of unfulfilled dreams.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Life, Parting