Kathy Acker Quotes

I never remember my dreams.

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Sometimes my dreams are so deep that I dream that I'm dreaming.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.

We are all geniuses when we dream.

Sometimes, upon waking, the residual dream can be more appealing that reality, and one is reluctant to give it up. For a while, you feel like a ghost -- Not fully materialized, and unable to manipulate your surroundings. Or else, it is the dream that haunts you. You wait with the promise of the next dream.

We are in a waking dream... We see worlds where others scheme.

You know that place between sleep and awake? The place where you still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you... Peter Pan. That's where I'll be waiting.

Our treasures trifles seem, and all our life is dreaming, and the dreams themselves are dreams.

It often comes into my head That we may dream when we are dead, But I am far from sure we do. O that it were so! then my rest Would be indeed among the blest; I should for ever dream of you.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that I was dreaming.

Writing is only a guided dream.

It's hard to dream when you're deep inside of one.

You're innocent when you dream.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.

May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.

When you're dreaming, you don't know it's a dream. You might even interpret a dream in your dream - and then wake up and realize it was all a dream. Perhaps a great awakening will reveal this to be a dream as well.