Anna Quindlen Quotes

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain.

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.

If you really want to dream, be fully awake.

Day and night I always dream with open eyes." - José Martí

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

I'm just a little bit tired If you know what I mean Don't want to be in a crowd When I can be in a dream.

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze andstone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horsesalong the edges of thick forests, and then we know that we have looked backthrough the ivory gates into that world of wonder that was ours, before we were wise and unhappy.

Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

My body is on the earth, but my head is in the stars.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

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