Waking Life Quotes

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet. ~ William Golding

In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old - I don't think I'd started school yet - when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing which had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream. As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I'd bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn't seen it for a year or more - I don't think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake.

When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled.

'But what's scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.'

I shook my head, meaning that the doll I'd owned - and barely remembered - had never scared me. 'But it was very scary,' I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying.

My mother looked at me, baffled. 'But it's not scary,' she said gently. I'm sure she was trying to make me feel better, and thought this reasonable statement would help. ~ Lisa Tuttle

He saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something - someone - else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while THAT someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor's sleep. ~ Paul Harding

It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare. ~ Bertrand Russell

People who pay attention to their lives, watch for clues from their dreams, and then make adjustments in waking life based on the information in dreams, can follow the highest path in the direction that their lives are ultimately meant to go. ~ Teresa DeCicco

Most people are either sleep walking through their waking life or wake walking through their sleeping life. either way they're not getting much out of it. ~ Waking Life

In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly. There, free of all images, the soul is fed in contemplation by the essences of the highest realm, knowing the permanent noumena of things. Then, satiated with this knowing, it descends again to the earthly realm. And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul's spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make permanent the work of art. Art is thus materialized dream, separated from the ordinary consciousness of waking life. ~ Pavel Florensky

As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you. ~ Iain Banks

There are nights when dreams are so vivid it's impossible to believe that they aren't really a part of your waking life. Your ~ Leigh Raines

Well, this time I'll be honest with you and let you in on it. Listen, in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused perhaps by indigestion or whatever, a man may think up such artistic creations, such complex and realistic visions, events or even a whole world of events woven into a plot of such astounding details that even Leo Tolstoi himself could not invent them. And yet people who have such dreams don't have to be novelists but can be the most ordinary civil servants, newspapermen, priests, or anything . . . It creates, in fact, a most interesting problem: once, for instance, I heard a member of the government say that his best ideas came to him when he was asleep. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nash's lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature. Just as the overconcreteness of a dream is related to the intangible themes of waking life, Nash's search for a piece of paper, a carte d'identité, mirrored his former pursuit of mathematical insights. Yet the gulf between the two recognizably related Nashes was as great as that between Kafka, the controlling creative genius, struggling between the demands of his self-chosen vocation and ordinary life, and K, a caricature of Kafka, the helpless seeker of a piece of paper that will validate his existence, rights, and duties. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion. Survival, both of the self and the world, appears to be at stake. Where once he had ordered his thoughts and modulated them, he was now subject to their peremptory and insistent commands. ~ Sylvia Nasar

Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life. ~ Sigmund Freud

It is good to pay attention to our dreams. For a period of a few weeks, write them down each morning. You don't have to do anything else. Just write them down. They have their own magic and will bleed into your waking life. While ~ Natalie Goldberg

They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep." "Then ~ Robert E. Howard

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life. ~ Margaret Atwood

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are? ~ Henry David Thoreau

She didnʹt know if she could carry on by herself, but then, she realized that if this wasnʹt a dream - and dear God, did it feel real - there was no magic "stop" in real life. If she couldnʹt deal with loneliness in a dream, she never would be able to while waking. ~ Richelle Mead

What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers? ~ Lewis Mumford

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect! ~ Philip Larkin

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

My waking life probably gave my subconscious an inferiority complex. ~ Jordan Castillo Price

I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away. ~ Alex Garland

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's. ~ Johan Huizinga

Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world-just no more confusing than any other. ~ Alex Garland

Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life. "If ~ M.R. Carey

If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda - the bliss of Being. Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background without which these experiences would not be possible.

Whenever there is beauty, kindness, the recognition of the goodness of simple things in your life, look for the background to that experience within yours ~ Eckhart Tolle

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? ~ Siri Hustvedt

We avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life. ~ Sigmund Freud

And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,
Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
Be all a dream in that eternal life
To which we wake not till we sleep in death ~ Pedro Calderon De La Barca

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become. ~ Alice Hoffman

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. ~ Richard Linklater

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof ... that literature - that narrative art in whatever form - will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories - human stories, stories that speak to us - in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that. ~ Adam Hammond

We imagine that waking-life is real and that dream-life is unreal, but there does not seem to be any evidence for this belief. ~ Wei Wu Wei

But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared. ~ Laurie Lee

though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn't regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone. ~ Garth Greenwell

The question is this: What if waking life is incapable of adequately attuning us to the needs of our unconscious minds? ~ Marina Benjamin

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind - as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book.
"It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest.
It's the boy from my dreams.
The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life.
I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey.
I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed.
Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade.
"You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it.
I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother.
I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, thoug ~ Alyson Noel

Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin. ~ Vivian Gornick

Dreams are a direct feedback mechanism to the dreamer. They will tell you if you're getting sick, if you need to repair your relationship with your kids, if you're in a toxic romantic relationship, if you need self-care; the imagery will report back to you all matters in you waking life that require attention. ~ Teresa DeCicco

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. ~ Sigmund Freud

His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs. ~ Jardine Libaire

Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos. ~ Jackie Gleason

By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us. ~ Sigmund Freud

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. ~ Cormac McCarthy

God does not deal directly with man: it is by means of spirits that all the intercourse and communication of gods with men, both in waking life and in sleep, is carried on. ~ Socrates

I will paint you
With a subtle shade of sadness
Sitting on a blue chair
In a long forgotten room
Surrounded by four walls of regret
And one open door

I will paint you
With another lost opportunity
Disguising broad strokes of desperation
And muted tones of quiet fear
Just below the shallow surface
Of enduring regrets

I will paint you
With a broken piece of me
On an autumn day
Beneath a hundred trees
And except for the sorrowful cries
Of recalling long abandoned places
I will paint you
With no sound of waking life
Or what might have been

I will paint you
With just a single tear
Fallen from this broken heart
For all the things lost on earth ~ Alacazam

The ride does not require an explanation, just participants. ~ Sonny Barger

When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well ... ~ Alice Hoffman

Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled. ~ George Santayana

It was not possible to hold on to ashes. In my dreams I had always walked out of the past, and it shut behind me, a door I couldn't unlock. Now I intended to do the same in my waking life. ~ Alice Hoffman

They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life? ~ Richard Linklater, Waking Life

The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams. ~ Plato

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you. ~ Iain Banks

And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. ~ C.S. Lewis

Which is the most universal human characteristic: Fear or laziness? ~ Louis Mackey

The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

One's work usually occupies more than half of one's waking life. Choosing work that does not bring happiness will lead to a life that is mostly disappointing. ~ Bo Bennett

Sing songs that none have sung, think thoughts that ne'er in the brain have rung,
Walk in paths that none have trod, weep tears as none have shed for God,
Give peace to all to whom none other gave,
Claim him your own who's everywhere disclaimed.
Love all with love that none have felt and
Brave the battle of life with strength unchained. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I try to be aware of the life that surrounds me as much as my mind permits me. It's the only time I have new blissful moments, and I love bliss. ~ Alicia Sixtos

Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Growing old can mean more than slowing down; it can be a time of truly growing down and incarnating further. Because the inner genius that tries to incarnate through us will keep calling for us to awaken further until we come to the end of our life adventure. ~ Michael Meade

Your path in life will lead you to places you have never dreamed of. You have to believe in yourself. ~ Peggy M. McAloon

It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations. But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life. ~ George Saunders

This life is a path more than just going to heaven or hell, it's a way of testing ourselves everyday. I feel that there is more to getting into heaven than just doing what is right or wrong, I feel it's a way of testing our maturely, and to see if we are able to grow as a person inside and out, and to know that we have learn from our mistakes, life is a way of testing us to see if we know the meaning about this life. ~ Austin V. Songer

There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not. They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. ~ Adrian Tan

I have to hurt other people in order to get what I want, I don't have a choice but to. In life, you gotta do the right things for the wrong reasons. Or the wrong things for the right reasons. ~ Khali Raymond

You are in love and you think that is all there is in the world. But the world is bigger than you, Will, and may have need of you. You are a Shadowhunter. You serve a greater cause. Your life is not yours to throw away. ~ Cassandra Clare

For Fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins ev'n from the birth are Misery and Man! ~ Homer

I know that a life without a cause is a life without an effect. ~ Paulo Coelho

Hear me Niah, hear me Mother. This flesh your feast. This blood your wine. This life, this end, my gift to you. Hold him close. ~ Jay Kristoff

Heart can't feel pain or sufferings when it is in love. ~ Debasish Mridha

I wish for everyone to fall in love with their own work. Did you just paint something that you think is cool? Photograph it! Are you struggling over an issue that's affecting your creativity? Write about it! Your art is the story of your life and you are the only one who can tell it. Tell people what you want them to know about you. Tell them why your art is special. Be constantly overflowing with enthusiasm for your work. Be you, not another artist. Meet the world as you are, and grow with them. The art experience and the human experience can be very similar at times. ~ Shayla Maddox

Lives are made of strings of moments, and every once in a while, one of those moments is pivotal and defining. It changes everything, alters you so completely that when you look back, there's a clear before and after ~ Elizabeth Norris

He makes love to me then, like only Naz can, alternating between slow and deep and rough and hard, sending me into a tailspin. It's a breath-catching, skin-slapping, soul-capturing kind of love. The man owns me. He consumes me. Every part of me was made for every part of him. It's the kind of love I can't imagine ever living without. It's raw, and real, and it's ours.
It's ours.
It goes on forever.
Life flashes before my eyes.
We're old and gray and happy. We're happy.
Nothing is going to get in our way now. ~ J.M. Darhower

Don't be snowed by a handsome guy at a bookstore who quotes Cicero and Proust. They are often not the real thing. As with many fleeting pleasures
travel in their company, enjoy them every so often, and then get on with your life. ~ Jennifer Kaufman

Drifting away from one's culture leaves one stranded in the middle of nowhere till the time his suffocation strangles him. ~ Q.M. Sidd

Pink champagne
that's the kind of life we've both been used to. It might be a little difficult to
do you like beer? ~ Deborah Kerr

There comes a time in life when everything you have know, tolerated and loved is suddenly shattered, all you can do is breathe Maureen Momm ~ Catie Hartsfield

I've sung my whole life. I've taken lots of voice lessons and I love to sing. But I've never really sung professionally at all. ~ Liv Tyler

A person is made up of all the little choices they make in life. The choices no one ever sees. ~ Kim Liggett

Production is the greatest assessment of time well spent ~ Sunday Adelaja

The concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole may drag out its sorry existence. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Choose life, choose to be happy and make somebody smile. ~ Ray S. Jones

Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves.
The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need. ~ J.I. Packer

High school will probably be better. I mean, some kids will still be jerks, but it's not so bad if you have at least one good friend. Someone who gets you. ~ Robin Stevenson

Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. ~ Charles M. Schulz

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it ~ Ron Rash

Life isn't about getting and having, it's about giving and being. –Kevin Kruse ~ Kevin E. Kruse

After I left LA ... it was like waking up. And so I moved back east and stopped auditioning. ~ Casey Affleck

I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades. ~ David Nicholls

The outside world can only trigger or block your experience of your true nature. Each time something beautiful takes your breath away, that's you experiencing yourself. Each time you fall in love with someone, that's you experiencing yourself. Each time a child's smile gives you unspeakable joy, that's you experiencing yourself. Your true nature is beautiful. Life is the art of rediscovering yourself, again and again, in different forms, celebrating, rejoicing, welcoming. You are beautiful. You are life itself. ~ Vironika Tugaleva