Waking Quotes

Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.

~ William Shakespeare

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

~ Angela Carter

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.

~ Roman Payne

No one ever changed the world waking up at noon.

~ Connor Chalfant

It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.

~ Shannon Celebi

...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.

~ Iain Banks

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

~ Ben Aaronovitch

I was happy in the dream; but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn't want to start. My skin was crawling, and I couldn't manage a single clear thought. It was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape. I didn't get much done that day.

~ Ninni Holmqvist

... he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreamas were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality—why the horror was so total and the ecstacy so complete—and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture—and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had just been a path through some woods.

~ Ayn Rand

Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell them apart.

~ Shannon Hale

Be gentle,always delicatewith every soulyou meet,for every single morningyou wake up,there is someoneWishing,silentlyand secretly,that theyhad not.

~ Tyler Knott Gregson

You don't need a prophet to wake you up from your bed; you need no archbishop to describe the size of your spoon for you. Remember, you are in the center of management of your own affairs when the time comes for you to act!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.

~ Lauren Oliver

I was wrenched awake at the tail-end of a stifled scream. I fought my way up from a deep dark dream. The scream had been mine.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

~ Angela Carter

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone

~ James Dashner

And in that foggy place between sleep and waking, he could have been anyone. That was what she liked most about him: In the darkness, he became whomever she wanted.

~ Aryn Kyle

Physical body is just an instrument, through which you experience life. You have the awareness field, along with the physical body to experience life, while the entire major functions of the physical body, is performed by the subtle strings of the soul.

~ Roshan Sharma

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

~ Novalis

Asleep you can experience many hours whilst only a few waking moments have passed. This is why dreams are an ideal platform for training.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.

~ Padma Lakshmi

Gratitude for me is waking up each day, and being able to make a difference in somebody’s life.

~ Charmaine J Forde

So start with the waking state. When you are hungry eat, but always remember that it is the body that is hungry, not you. If you hurt your leg, wash and clean the wound, apply medication, but always remember that it is the body that is hurt, not you. This much remembrance – and you will find that ninety-nine percent of the pain has vanished. This slight knowledge, this little awareness removes so much of your suffering. One percent is bound to remain because the knowledge is not total. When knowledge becomes total all of the suffering disappears.Buddha said that an awakened person is beyond suffering. You can cut off the limbs of such a person, you can throw him in the fire, you can kill him, but you cannot make him suffer, because he stands apart from all that is happening around him.

~ Osho

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

~ Roman Payne

Cry no tears for us, my friend.” I pry at her fingers, panicking to be released in fear that she may drag me into death with her. She croaks again, “Lend no aches to the dreams of yesterday.” From the corpse of Warren, his greyish gums smack from whatever goo has settled in his mouth, “Allow the tide sweep free the bay.” Then together they sing in zombie choir, “And home the ships sailing send.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

~ Theodore Roethke

I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook.

~ George Grossmith

When we are asleep, so it seems to me, we sleep surrounded by all the years. I have imagined, sleeping, that I heard the footsteps of the long-dead; I have held conversations with them, and with the blank-faced people I was yet to meet, conversations that seemed of unbearable poignancy, though when I woke I could remember only a few words, and those not words that possessed, waking, any emotional significance to me. It is said that this is because content is divorced from emotion in sleep, as though the sleeping mind read two books at once, one of tears and lust and laughter, the other words and phrases picked up from old newspapers, from grimy handbills blowing along the street and conversations overheard in barbershops and bars, and the banalities of radio. I think rather that we have forgotten on waking what the words have meant to us, or have not learned as yet what they will mean. But the worst thing is to wake and remember that we have been talking to the dead, having never thought to hear that voice again, having never any expectation of hearing it again before we ourselves are gone.

~ Gene Wolfe