Jonathan Coe Quotes

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

Why, he wondered, should he remember her suddenly, on such a day, watching the rain falling on the apple trees?

When I turned the corner, I saw Toni waving at me from the elevator. I think I've already told you how it made me feel to see her smile and wave at me. You can have your sunsets and waterfalls. If a piano were to suddenly fall on my head, that's the image I'd want forever engraved in my mind. —Alton Richard

If the land of make believe is inside your heart it will never leave.

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

[T]hese last few days where I've moped around damn near depressed for real, because of people who do not exist. Not really. I can buy them Christmas presents, but there is no way to send them. Sometimes I feel like I should be able to walk into the next room and there they will be, but they won't. These people do not exisit as flesh and blood, but there are different kinds of reality, and there are days when imagination feels very, very real.

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn't have. He is everything I needed and couldn't find in real life. Of course he is. That's why I invented him.

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

They wouldn't understand, and I don't feel the need to explain, simply because I know in my heart how real it was. When I think of you, I can't help smiling, knowing that you've completed me somehow. I love you, not just for now, but for always, and I dream of the day that you'll take me in your arms again

And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?

I used to build dreams about you.

If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was, and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.

Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break.

All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.

The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.

And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!