Quotes by British Authors - Page 660

Believe in yourself, your dreams, wishes, desires and goals, even if others don’t.
Lily Amis
Pursuing dreams can be daunting. It feels like you're standing on the edge of a cliff staring at your dream as it sits on a cloud, floating out in the open air, and all you need to do is take that leap to see if you'll fall or if you'll fly.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
G.K. Chesterton
Those dreams seem very simple to me now, a crude, crayon-drawn picture by a wistful child. But the beauty of impossible dreams is that they are impossible - the hows and whens don't really matter.
Tracy Rees
The DreamLord ByronOur life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,A boundary between the things misnamedDeath and existence: Sleep hath its own world,And a wide realm of wild reality,And dreams in their development have breath,And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,They take a weight from off waking toils,They do divide our being; they becomeA portion of ourselves as of our time,And look like heralds of eternity;They pass like spirits of the past -they speakLike sibyls of the future; they have power -The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;They make us what we were not -what they will,And shake us with the vision that's gone by,The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?Creations of the mind? -The mind can makeSubstances, and people planets of its ownWith beings brighter than have been, and giveA breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.I would recall a vision which I dreamedPerchance in sleep -for in itself a thought,A slumbering thought, is capable of years,And curdles a long life into one hour.----------Il sognoLord ByronDuplice è la nostra vita: il Sonno ha il suo proprio mondo,un confine tra le cose chiamate impropriamentemorte e esistenza: il Sonno ha il proprio mondo,e un vasto reame di sfrenata realtà;e nel loro svolgersi i sogni hanno respiro,e lacrime e tormenti e sfiorano la gioia;lasciano un peso sui nostri pensieri da svegli,tolgono un peso dalle nostre fatiche da svegli,dividono il nostro essere; diventanoparte di noi stessi e del nostro tempo,e sembrano gli araldi dell'eternità;passano come fantasmi del passato, parlanocome Sibille dell'avvenire; hanno potere -la tirannia del piacere e del dolore;ci rendono ciò che non fummo, secondo il loro volere,e ci scuotono con dissolte visioni,col terrore di svanite ombre. Ma sono veramente così?Non è forse tutto un'ombra il passato? Cosa sono?Creazioni della mente? La mente sa crearesostanza, e popolare pianeti, di sua fattura,di esseri più splendenti di quelli mai esistiti, e darerespiro e forma che sopravvivono alla carne.Vorrei richiamare una visione che ho sognatoforse nel sonno, poiché in sé un pensiero,un pensiero assopito, racchiude anni,e in un'ora condensa una lunga vita.
George Gordon Byron
In dreams the images in the mind, in the subconscious, merge with and obliterate the perceptions from the astral senses, in a similar way that in daily life the subconscious causes the external world to be perceived with the colorations of thoughts, feelings, images, and emotions; in other words, we daydream or get lost in thoughts.
Belsebuub
Everyone is searching for something. Some people pursue security, others pleasure or power. Yet others look for dreams, or they know not what. There are, however, those who know what they seek but cannot find it in the natural world. For these searchers many clues have been laid out by those who have gone before. The traces are everywhere, although only those with eyes to see or ears to hear perceive them. When the significance of these signs is seriously acted upon, Providence opens a door out of the natural into the supernatural to reveal a ladder from the transient to the Eternal. He who dares the ascent enters the Way of Kabbalah.
Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
J.G. Ballard
But what is a dream, Conor O'Malley? Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?
Patrick Ness
Though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, the whole thing is deadly. So with this.
C.S. Lewis
This seems to be happening more and more, the dreams from the past blurring into reality and sadly, I preferred to be in the dream world rather than reality.
Emily Williams
A bed is a place where so much of life is played out - births and deaths and passions and dreaming - all the most fundamental moments of our fragile human existence.
Tracy Rees
The night it fallsThe stars shine throughThe inky blackThat is the cueFor plot demandsThat dreams be sownThe fantasies I have aloneThe words come fastThey flow like wineI am the midnight writer...
Virginia Alison
Anything is possible if you've got enough nerve
J.K. Rowling
DREAMSNever by many are marvels wrought,By one or two are the dreams first caught. . .The dreamer must toil when the odds are great,Must stand to failure and work and wait.Must keep his faith though he stand alone,Until the truth of his dream is known.
Edgar Guest
Her hands reach out for intangible dreams as dust motes dance in the spectrum of light across one corner of the room.
Tracey-anne McCartney
Such views the youthful Bard allure,But, heedless of the following gloom,He deems their colours shall endure'Till peace go with him to the tomb.—And let him nurse his fond deceit,And what if he must die in sorrow!Who would not cherish dreams so sweet,Though grief and pain may come tomorrow?
William Wordsworth
The principles of catching rumours were, in fact, similar to the principals of catching dreams, but because rumour was weightier, the catcher had to be positioned closer to the ground. Rumour flew low, dreams flew high, and somewhere in between were prayers.
Sarah Winman
Whose ideas breathe through me? Am I a thief? Do I dream my own dreams?
Suzy Davies
Dreams largerthan ourselves we killed, not wantingour smallness measured against them."(poem: Having Taken the Necessary Precautions)
Brian Patten
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it; it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that we had known. At first I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened. Nature had come into her own again, and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way, had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the orders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all. I cam upon it suddenly There was Manderley secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.” Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.
Daphne du Maurier
It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head
Neil Gaiman
External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.
Harry Guntrip
Is it true,’ she said, ‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.’‘Well’, I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.
Jean Rhys
Dreams, kindled in the fire of imagination,ignite in the brilliance of our minds,and are wrought in the work of our hands" -
Suzy Davies
That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against.
Olivia Sudjic
And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.
C.S. Lewis
Turns out there's more than one way to achieve your dreams.
Katy Cannon
My dreams become reality.Your dreams become forgotten.I guess that's why we're different,I don't fit into the crowd.Whereas you're part of the flock.
Anthony T.Hincks
Have a dream in your head and a fire in your heart.
Fennel Hudson
Being gentle doesn’t stop us fighting for our dreams.
Fennel Hudson
The act of fishing – for fish, dreams or whatever magic is available – is enough.
Fennel Hudson
Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night’s elusive catch.
Helen Simpson
Dreams are what gives us insight into what may be if we have the get up and go to do it.
Anthony T.Hincks
I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Visionaries create dreams out of thin air!
Anthony T.Hincks
You should never ever lose sight of your dreams.
Anthony T.Hincks
If you don't follow your dreams, someone else, somewhere will follow theirs. Don't get left behind.
Anthony T.Hincks
For in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let them swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud. (Albus Dumbledore)
J.K. Rowling
With my arms wrapped around Rosebud, I dreamed of heather-topped hills and sleepy valleys and a pretty woodland stream where dragonflies danced across the water as I sat down among the ferns and the meadowsweet, waiting for the summer to find me.
Hazel Gaynor
I moved silently across the garden, silvered with moonlight, my feet barely touching the ground. I brushed past fern and tree, following the lights across the stream, toward the cottage in the clearing where I watched a little girl surrounded by light and laughter as the fairies threaded flowers through her hair. I stood out of sight, peering through the tangled blackberry bushes, but the girl saw me, rushing forward, her hand outstretched, a white flower clasped between her fingers. "For Mammy," she said. "For my Mammy.
Hazel Gaynor
Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.
J.M. Barrie
The dreams of childhood—its 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, for the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world
Charles Dickens
Your imagination can take you to the best and worst places. It is a ship on a sea of dreams and it's up to you to steer it.
Aliya Whiteley
My life, as it passes thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep!
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
With the rumble of the waterfall in the distance, I slipped into sleep and dreamed of a red-haired girl holding a posy of white flowers. The words of Mr. Noyes's poem crept from the pages of my picture book and tiptoed into my mind. "Then you blow your magic vial, / Shape it like a crescent moon, / Set it up and make your trial, / Singing, 'Fairies, ah, come soon!
Hazel Gaynor
Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.
Iris Murdoch
Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.
Iain Pears
The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?
Mary Balogh
Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.
Mike Carey
I must break out......start a new life...been here for years...might be getting into a rut...something a bit more exciting...more adventurous...something with more of a challenge...There's not much opportunity for self-advancement in toilets...
Raymond Briggs
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Graham Greene
Happy Hauntings; and, pleasant dreams!
Peter James
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. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears.Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn't explain. Now I think - and of course I could be wrong - that what upset me was that I'd just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn't share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming. ("My Death")
Lisa Tuttle
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
C.S. Lewis
The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.
Neil Gaiman
Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight.
Anna Kavan
If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.
Kamila Shamsie
Dreams show what a person takes to eternity—not a heaven but a chaos. Dreams provide a doorway that opens to the inner world of oneself. They show the intricate workings of the mind in ways that cannot be avoided or hidden.
Belsebuub
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then
Salman Rushdie