“Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep.”

— E. B. White

Foreword to revised edition (1982)
One Man's Meat (1942)
Context: Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me … I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.

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E. B. White 54

American writer 1899–1985

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

“Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 54)

“Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture VIII, "The Divided Self, and the Process of its Unification"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us — they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.