William Wordsworth Quotes

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

A man's dreams are a maze even he cannot know.

If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.

Men scanning the surface count the wicked happy; they see not the frightful dreams that crowd a bad man's pillow.

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

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

I will do my best to dodge tonight's depression Hide in sleep Damage myself in dreams Wake up older, slightly more used.

our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

If I need a cause for celebration, Or a comfort I can use to ease my mind, I rely on my imagination, And I dream of an imaginary time.

What does it mean when nightmares dream of peace? When shadows wish for light?

There are things of which I may not speak; There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,Reality's dark dream!I turn from you, and listen to the wind,Which long has raved unnoticed.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.

Even my nighttime dreams are very, very rooted in reality. They just start to become surreal, little by little.

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

Once someone dreams a dream, it can't just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can't remember it, what becomes of it?

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.