Quotes about nightmare

A collection of quotes on the topic of nightmare, dreams, dream, likeness.

Quotes about nightmare

“There is nothing that can take the pain away. But eventually you will find a way to live with it. There will be nightmares. And every day when you wake up, it will be the first thing you think about. Until one day, it will be the second thing.”

Raymond Reddington

The Blacklist

Pain, Way, Thinking

“Today is filled with anger, fueled with hidden hate.
Scared of being outkast, afraid of common fate.
Today is build on tragedies which no one want's to face.
Nightmares to humanity and morally disgraced.
Tonight is filled with Rage, violence in the air.
Children bred with ruthlessness cause no one at home cares.
Tonight I lay my head down but the pressure never stops,
knowing that my sanity content when I'm droped.
But tomorrow I see change, a chance to build a new,
build on spirit intent of heart and ideas based on truth.
Tomorrow I wake with second wind and strong because of pride.
I know I fought with all my heart to keep the dream alive.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Hate, Fate, Children, Truth

“I never really got nightmares for movies. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

Life, Family

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Dreams, Faith

“I had a dream
I got everything I wanted
Not what you'd think
And if I'm being honest
It might have been a nightmare
To anyone who might care”

Billie Eilish (2001) American singer-songwriter

"everything i wanted" · First live performance, Mexico City (12 December 2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgdG91aCsPU <br class="br">Singles (2017 - )

Dreams, Thinking

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children…. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Life, Children

“Yeah. The guy's up against massive challenges, dealing with consequences, and figuring how to get what he wants and what he believes is right. He's living his worst nightmare, and he's doing everything he can. He's a damn good lawyer and he knows the system, but he's having to pull jokers out of his sleeve and win certain things on sheer willpower and gamble and meddle, you know? So that's what dramas allow, more so than a comedy. It's real-life consequences. The blows, the punches really hurt. The bullets really land. The people really bleed. People really cry. People really enjoy victory. People really feel pain and defeat. You can love harder. You can cry harder. You can be more angry, harder. That's what dramas allow.”

Matthew McConaughey (1969) American actor

" Exclusive interview with Matthew Mcconaughey http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/7774937/exclusive-interview-with-matthew-mcconaughey?page=all" on hollywood.com, March 18, 2011: On playing Mick Haller in the The Lincoln Lawyer

Love, Life, Pain, People

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Pain, World, Sadness, Fear

“I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

Dreams, Girl

“From Russia I didn’t bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror …”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

Fallaci interview (1973)

Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Memory

“We made the Robots look too much alike. A hundred thousand identical faces all looking this way. A hundred thousand expressionless faces. It's a nightmare.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Way

“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Women, Beauty, Feeling, Strong

“I’m neither your friend nor your frenemy, unless you have what I want.
In that case, I’m not only your enemy, I’m your nightmare.”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

“Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Sleep

“They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Dreams

“Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Source: Humboldt's Gift

Life, Thinking

“Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Fear, Dreams

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

On audiences, Asbury Park NJ Press (13 August 1974).

Pleasure

“Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

“I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

Dreams

“The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1919)
Context: p>Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?</p

Sleep

“Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

As quoted in The Independent (25 February 1989)

Dreams, Nature

“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

I, st. 4 <br class="br">The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

Sleep

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 8)

Death, Wisdom, Soul, Imagination

“The truth, first of all, about Dreyfus' trial and conviction: At the root of it all is one evil man, Lt. Colonel du Paty de Clam, who was at the time a mere Major. He is the entire Dreyfus case, and the entirety of it will only come to light when an honest enquiry firmly establishes his actions and responsibilities. … Nobody would ever believe the experiments to which he subjected the unfortunate Dreyfus, the traps he set for him, the wild investigations, the monstrous fantasies, the whole demented torture.
Ah, that first trial! What a nightmare it is for all who know it in its true details. Major du Paty de Clam had Dreyfus arrested and placed in solitary confinement. He ran to Mme Dreyfus, terrorised her, telling her that, if she talked, that was it for her husband. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Dreyfus was tearing his hair out and proclaiming his innocence.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Truth, Tear, Light, Evil

“Finally I came upon a pair of rooms missing entire walls, into which a little forest of underbrush and stunted trees had grown. I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. I couldn't square my grandfather's idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he'd found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it. There was more left to explore, but suddenly it seemed like a waste of time; it was impossible that anyone could still be living here, even the most misanthropic recluse. I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth.”

Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 3, Page 81

Truth, Feeling, Idea, Sense

“Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Life, God, World, Dreams

“Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels — they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Paris Review interview (1956)

Truth, Art, Feeling, Reality

“In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror—indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. Dunsany, indeed, has said exquisitely almost everything I could possibly wish to say; so that when I indulge in sheer phantasy I can do no more than imitate him. Thus horror alone is left as my peculiar kingdom, & in it I must hold my lowly reproduction of a Plutonian court.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 316-317
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Beauty, Imagination

“The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Writing", p. 27
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

God, Dreams, Singing

“Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry — God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Vikinga berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares — aye — I speak truly — for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (3 May 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 227
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

God, Mountain, Nature

“And traffic! Traffic's a nightmare! That's how people describe it, a nightmare. Has anyone had this nightmare? "AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" "What is it, darling? Are you all right?" "No, I'm not all right at all!" "What was it?"”

Michael McIntyre (1976) British comedian

"TRAFFIC!!!"
Live and Laughing (2008)

People

“I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (27 September 1938), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 372.
Prime Minister
Context: I would not hesitate to pay even a third visit to Germany, if I thought it would do any good... I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living: but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.

World, Fear, Peace, Feeling

“I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Closing statements of presentation at Beyond Belief : Science, Religion, Reason and Survival (5 November 2006)
Context: There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.

World, Religion, Thinking

“Many crimes have men committed in the name of the God of Love, moved by this nightmare of superstition; be very careful therefore that no slightest trace of it remains in you.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

§ IV
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Context: Superstition is another mighty evil, and has caused much terrible cruelty. The man who is a slave to it despises others who are wiser, tries to force them to do as he does. Think of the awful slaughter produced by the superstition that animals should be sacrificed, and by the still more cruel superstition that man needs flesh for food. Think of the treatment which superstition has meted out to the depressed classes in our beloved India, and see in that how this evil quality can breed heartless cruelty even among those who know the duty of brotherhood. Many crimes have men committed in the name of the God of Love, moved by this nightmare of superstition; be very careful therefore that no slightest trace of it remains in you.

Love, Men, God

“In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Armageddon in Retrospect

Story: "The commandant's desk" - p.193
Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)

War, World

“The writer is not only the conscience of the world, but also its nightmare.”

Teodor Burnar

World

“I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?”

Poppy Z. Brite book Exquisite Corpse

Source: Exquisite Corpse

Thinking

“Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Fear

“This was a nightmare scenario for any bodyguard: stuck in the middle of a transparent tube, several miles underwater, with a murdering band of fugitives at one end and an enthralled but still highly skilled police officer at the other.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

“We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.”

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) Welsh author and mystic

Source: The Terror

Life, Dreams, Star, Thinking

“They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Dreams

“Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare…”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Forgiveness, Personality

“Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

“Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.”

John Grisham book The Confession

Source: The Confession

Life, Death

“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

“Sleepwalking?"
"Nightmare?"
"Homicidal psycho jungle cat!”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Cats

“We're playing Scrabble. It's a nightmare."

"Scrabble?" He sounds surprised. "Scrabble's great."

"Not when you're playing with a family of geniuses, it's not. They all put words like 'iridiums'. And I put 'pig'.”

Sophie Kinsella book I've Got Your Number

Source: I've Got Your Number

Family

“Don't you ever feel that way? Likecould do a better job if you rqan the world?'
'Um… no. Me running the world would be kind of a nightmare.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

World, Way, Feeling

“I see IT in the hallway. IT goes to Merryweather. IT is walking with Aubrey cheerleader. IT is my nightmare and I can't wake up. IT sees me. IT smiles and winks. Good thing my lips are stitched together or I'd throw up.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Smile

“Of course I have nightmares-Who doesn't?”

Darren Shan book Blood Beast

Source: Blood Beast

“I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there's nothing like making a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Variant: There's nothing like the feeling of knowing that you've made a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.
Source: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Life, Success

“I see the dream and I see the nightmare, and I believe you can't have the dream without the nightmare”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Dreams

“A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Dreams

“… even the most horribl e of nightmares is laced with the promise of dawn.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

“I have nightmares about hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you.”

Jim Butcher book Vignette

Source: Vignette

People, Hell

“Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women. He thought for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it…”

Steven Erikson book Memories of Ice

Source: Memories of Ice

Women, God, World

“Nothing chased nightmares away faster than the rustle of printed paper.”

Cornelia Funke (1958) author

“Because I can't handle the nightmares. Not without you.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“Sometimes when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena. To make myself put a name to the thing I've lost. But what's the use? It's gone. He's gone. Whatever existed between us is gone. All that's left is my promise to kill Snow. I tell myself this ten times a day.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Katniss (p. 195)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Boy, Kiss, Strong, Time

“It's going to give you nightmares for the rest of your wasted life."
Oh, my God, I was so badass. It was all I could do not to give a”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Life, God

“As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Peace, Understanding, Night

“The thing about nightmares was that you couldn't prepare for them. They sneaked up on you when you were most vulnerable.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

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

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Dreams

“My nightmares are usually about losing you. I'm okay once I realize you're here.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“The farm god rolled his eyes. He pointed at the corn plant, and BAM! Nico di Angelo appeared in an exposion of corn silk. Nico looked around in panic. "I-I had the weirdest nightmare about popcorn.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

God, Appearance

“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

“I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if I were on the verge of death-plankton maybe."
-Percy Jackson”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Death

“Scarecrows weren't meant to scare the crows, they were meant to scare the corn. It was enough to give a person nightmares. Otherwise, why would so many horror movies have cornfields in them?”

Laura Ruby American writer

Source: Bone Gap

Personality

“It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare."
"And what is that nightmare, Craig?"
"Life.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Variant: I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Life

“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.”

Aleksandar Hemon The Lazarus Project

Source: The Lazarus Project

“No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

“Usually the people I do know are sufficient to spawn any number of nightmares without inventing any.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

People

“Life is a nightmare.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Life

“Half-man, half-beast, all nightmare. The shapeshifter warrior form.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

“He doesn't see my breasts or my waist or my hips. He only sees the nightmare.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

“Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Dreams, Heart, Goodbye

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: Nestor

History

“For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying… but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It

Hope, Cry

“I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Depressing

“They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl… an aria of fear made audible.
The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Fear, Suffering

“Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.”

Guy Sajer book The Forgotten Soldier

Source: The Forgotten Soldier

Death, Happiness, People, Reality

“Then stop trying to throw logic at nightmares. Sometimes the monsters are real, Anita. Sometimes they're real and the only way to defeat them is to be the bigger monster. ~Bibiana to Anita”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Bullet

Variant: Sometimes the monsters are real, Anita. Sometimes they’re real and the only way to defeat them is to be the bigger monster.'
- Chang Bibi to Anita
Source: Bullet

Way

“He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Reality

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Life, Death

“I’d gone with my usual option. I was running through long tunnels filled with demons and monsters and nightmares, because it was easier than going to the gym.”

Jim Butcher book Skin Game

Source: Skin Game

“Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.”

Dave Pelzer (1960) American author

Source: A Child Called "It"

Soul, Sun, Childhood

“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Pleasure, Time, Forgetting

“you ever been trapped in a world where you're everyone's worst nightmare?”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

World

“-"Nick?"
"I'm still here, Laurant."
-"Did you tell Tommy we slept together?"
"No, but you just did. He's standing right here."
She fell asleep. But this time she didn't have any dreams or nightmare.”

Julie Garwood (1946) American writer

Source: Heartbreaker

Dreams, Time

“Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love

“The United States, it is apparent even to the blind, is a nightmare of contradictions.”

Ferdinand Lundberg America's 60 Families

America's 60 Families, p. 5 (Vanguard Press, 1938)

“Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.”

Núria Añó (1973) Catalan writer novelist

Presage

Life

“Our nightmare, any of us, which would change the way we lived our lives, was if we thought that any moment Al Qaeda might detonate a nuclear weapon in a city anywhere in the world, because we learned that they had gotten hold of some plutonium from the North Koreans by sale, or when the North Korean regime collapsed, somebody smuggled it out.”

Ash Carter (1954) United States Secretary of Defense

pbs.org interview http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kim/interviews/acarter.html

World, Way, Learning, Change

“We have survived bitter divisions in our society. Reconciliation requires us to put aside our differences and forgive the injuries done to us just as justice is essential to that equation. Those who have done wrong and broken the law must be punished. There can be no setting to rights or settling of accounts without that element. Until that is done there will be no finality to our collective nightmare. Until we all accept that simple fact the sense of hurt and betrayal continue.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Our Country at the Crossroads - 2001 Parkinson Memorial Lecture Series, 15 August 2001 http://www.usp.ac.fj/journ/docs/news/wansolnews/wansol1508013.html.

Justice, Law, Forgiveness, Sense

“This is the archetypal suburban-conservative nightmare — anonymous hordes of leftist boat-rockers viciously assaulting the champion of the decent people, who is just a really nice guy given to tending his lawn and minding his own business. Being "nice" is a central part of the Brooks yuppie's guilt-proofing self-image rationale; so long as you're the kind of guy who lets people merge on highways, stands politely in line at Starbucks, doesn't put garish Christmas decorations on his lawn and pays his taxes, you're not really doing anything wrong. It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"David Brooks and the DLC: Best Friends Forever?", AlterNet (3 August 2006)

War, People, Guy, Business

“I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Last lines which West had written for his unfinished work The Last Confession, about the last days of Giordano Bruno.
The Last Confession (2000)

Music, Time