Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

I would say that my music is surreal, it's inspired by dreams, and it's inspired by heartbreak.

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can't I?

It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door.

How beautiful are dreams! In dreams the dead may live, even the long dead and the very silent.

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

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine.

You eat, in dreams, the custard of the day.

Every time I close my eyes, it's like a dark paradise. No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming -- weren't our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

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

I used to build dreams about you.

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.

Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

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.

Moments when the original 'poet' in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations by the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking.

All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.