“Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.”
#197
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
“Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.”
#197
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
“I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming.”
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
“But Grover’s voice was already growing fainter. ‘Sweet dreams. Don’t let me die!”
Source: The Sea of Monsters
8 November 1838
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)
Source: Emerson in His Journals
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), II
Context: Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!
“Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.”
Let America Be America Again (1935)
“Who am I to dream?,
dreams are for fools, they let you down…”
Wonderful World
Song lyrics, Undiscovered (James Morrison album) (2006)