Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream.

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.

Man is firmly convinced that he is awake; in reality he is caught in a net of sleep and dreams which he has unconsciously woven himself.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.

Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Our life is two fold Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality.

After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.

Sleep: the stepchild of Death.

The things that have been and shall be no more, The things that are, and that hereafter shall be, The things that might have been, and yet were not, The fading twilight of joys departed.

We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.

Someday is a dis-ease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

I'm grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.

Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.

Please don't wake me, no, don't shake me, leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping.

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own

Death-counterfeiting sleep.

When I waked, I cried to dream again

You never lose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby.