An Ancient Dream Quotes & Sayings

Menestheus, the son of Peteus, grandson of Orneus, and the great-grandson to Erechtheus, the first man that is recorded to have affected popularity and ingratiated himself with the multitude, stirred up and exasperated the most eminent men of the city, who had long borne a secret grudge to Theseus, conceiving that he had robbed them of their several little kingdoms and lordships, and, having pent them all up in one city, was using them as his subjects and slaves. He put also the meaner people into commotion, telling them, that, deluded with a mere dream of liberty, though indeed they were deprived both of that and of their proper homes and religious usages, instead of many good and gracious kings of their own, they had given themselves up to be lorded over by a new-comer and a stranger. — Plutarch

When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life - truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing. — John O'Donohue

The course of our lives follows ancient and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true, and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of life lie beyond the realm of reality. The instant they are shattered we are sick with longing for the days when they flamed within us. Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia. — Natalia Ginzburg

Laila remembered how Mammy had dropped to the ground, how she'd screamed, torn at her hair. But Laila couldn't even manage that. She could hardly move. She could hardly move a muscle.
She sat on the chair instead, hands limp in her lap, eyes staring at nothing, and let her mind fly on. She let it fly on until it found the place, the good and safe place, where the barley fields were green, where the water ran clear and the cottonwood seeds danced by the thousands in the air; where Babi was reading a book beneath an acacia and Tariq was napping with his hands laced across his chest, and where she could dip her feet in the stream and dream good dreams beneath the watchful gaze of gods of ancient, sun-bleached rock. — Khaled Hosseini

All play aspires to the condition of paradise ... through play in all its forms ... we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden ... always as removed, as an enclosed green place ... Paradise is an ancient dream ... It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

Ancient traditions have long associated holy wells and springs as very special places of the Goddess or anima mundi: symbolic of the Great Mother and associated with birth, the feminine principle, the universal womb, the prima materia, the waters of fertility and refreshment and the fountain of life. The dreaming sites, as they are called, have also been associated with visions, healing, and other paranormal experiences. In ancient Greece, for example, there were more than three-hundred medical centers placed at water sources, where patients experienced healing. — Christopher McDowell

There have always been dreamers. Men and women who catch a glimpse of something beyond themselves who dare to reach for goals and visions.. Yet no earthly dreamer can match the greatest of them all, the Dreamer who died on the cross to make His dream a reality. John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word." The literal meaning of logos, the original Greek term translated as "Word," is idea, thought or blueprint. It is an ancient Greek theatrical term describing the work of a playwright as he conceives, or dreams up, the plot of a play. So we could say, "In the beginning was the dream". — Tommy Tenney

Oh my God, not only is he older than the Grand Canyon, but he's like the pope and the Fae King and the president of the United States all rolled up into one. To some ancient cultures he had been a god.
He was going to hurt her so bad before he killed her so dead, and all she could think of was how hot his kiss had been in the dream and how delicate the touch of his finger was as it traced down her body. — Thea Harrison

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world - indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states - the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. — Peter Sloterdijk

The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows. — Paul Goodman

The dream clung to her. Her sleep had been full of Jupiter ever since the survey last week: that overwhelming, unstoppable girth; the swirling patterns of the atmosphere, dark belts and light stripes rolling in circular rivers of ammonia crystal clouds; every shade of orange in the spectrum, from soft, sand-coloured regions to vivid streams of molten vermilion; the breathtaking speed of a ten-hour orbit, whipping around and around the planet like a spinning top; the opaque surface, simmering and roaring in century-old tempests. And the moons! The ancient, pockmarked skin of Callisto and the icy crust of Ganymede. The rusty cracks of Europa's subterranean oceans. The volcanoes of Io, magma fireworks leaping up from the surface. — Lily Brooks-Dalton

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.
Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind. — Tahir Shah

Sovegna vos.
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse. — T. S. Eliot

But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.

Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity. — Craig Hallam

Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture). — Kenny Smith

Personal God To judge from the covenant between God and Abraham-note, too, the reference to a "god of Nahor" in Genesis 31:53-the ancient Hebrews were familiar with the idea of a personal god. The belief in the existence of a personal god was evolved by the Sumerians at least as early as the middle of the third millennium B.c. According to Sumerian teachers and sages, every adult male and family head had his "personal god," or a kind of good angel whom he looked upon as his divine father. This personal god was in all probability adopted by the Sumerian paterfamilias as the result of an oracle or a dream or a vision involving a mutual understanding or agreement — Samuel Noah Kramer

In its dream of the triumph of reason and science, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century failed in its hope of sweeping away old legends and superstitions like these - partly because the next generation, the Romantics, would condemn the reign of reason and embrace the ancient, the wild and mysterious, the mingling of fear and awe they called the sublime. In — Jan Swafford

Awake

Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and
choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach
in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the woolly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose, they croon, the Ancient Ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon,
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances. — The Doors

I have ... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls. As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out. — Colin McEnroe

Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of dream and fatigue. — Albert Camus

Modern physics is describing what the ancient wisdom keepers of the Americas have long known. These shamans, known as 'the Earthkeepers,' say that we're dreaming the world into being through the very act of witnessing it. Scientists believe that we're only able to do this in the very small subatomic world. Shamans understand that we also dream the larger world that we experience with our senses. — Alberto Villoldo

Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The helicopter is probably the most versatile instrument ever invented by man. It approaches closer than any other to fulfillment of mankind's ancient dreams of the flying horse and the magic carpet. — Igor Sikorsky

So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream. — Charles Kingsley

For I am inclined to believe that my beloved Arthur of the future is sitting at this very moment among his learned freinds, in the Combination Room of the College of Life, and that they are thinking away in there for all they are worth, about the best means to help our curious species: and I for one hope that some day, when not only England but the World has need of them, and when it is ready to listen to reason, if it ever is, they will issue forth from their rath in joy and power: and then perhaps, they will give us happiness in the world once more and chivalry, and the old medieval blessing of certain simple people - who tried, at any rate, in their own small way, to still the ancient brutal dream of Attila the Hun. — T.H. White

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
from a preface to
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Augusta Gregory — W.B.Yeats

Golbuchiks? Golbuchiks are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they'll all return to clay. They're full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust.
You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call
O tender specter, happy chance,
Again I heed the ancient lore,
Again with beauty rare in stance,
You beckon from the distant shore! — Tatyana Tolstaya

But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even this dreaded event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an ancient Etruscan grave, into which he has descended, happy in the satisfaction it has given to his archaeological interests. Similarly man makes the forces of nature not simply in the image of men with whom he can associate as his equals - that would not do justice to the overpowering impression they make on him - but he gives them the characteristics of the father, makes them into gods, thereby following not only an infantile, but also, as I have tried to show, a phylogenetic prototype. In — Sigmund Freud

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr — Henry David Thoreau

To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish. — Sigmund Freud

Survival is an ancient dream
Life is nothing but an everlasting illusion
Nothing is Real
Don't believe in illusion,
Remember me,
I am here ... — Rixa White

We who work in fantasy today take the threads from all the story tellers of the past. From the ancient, many colored threads we work to weave a new cloth. If the landscape, the characters, and the creatures here call up the old tales told the beside the fire, when stories went from mouth to ear instead of page to eye then I have woven well and the dreamer continues to dream. — Janet Lee Carey

Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise. — Euripides

India ... was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously ... Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages ... [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in ... and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged. — Shashi Tharoor

I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist. — Edward Abbey

Linus closes his eyes and puts his arms out at his sides. "Look to this day. For it is life. The very life of life." I stand beside him. Quiet. He continues. "It its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The splendor of beauty, the bliss of growth, the glory of action. Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope." He opens his eyes and looks at me. "It's an ancient Sufi text." He smiles. "My mantra." He folds his paper, bats me over the head with it and walks away. — Dana Reinhardt

TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other.
All I know is that I've been returned to earth violently; I've a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else.
Did V's charity to me almost cause my death?
I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters.
Yes - this dawn is at best difficult.
The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there's nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant.
Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning.
May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid.
The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual. — Kathy Acker

That wasn't a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons. — J.G. Ballard

Hermeticism is the science of nature hidden in the hieroglyphics and symbols of the ancient world. It is the search for the principle of life, along with the dream (for those who have not yet achieved it) of accomplishing the great work, that is the reproduction by man of the divine, natural fire which creates and recreates beings. — Eliphas Levi

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

the waking day of a mythically vibrant people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, is in fact more akin to dream than to the day of a sober scientific thinker. If — Friedrich Nietzsche

Personal weapons are what raised mankind out of the mud, and the rifle is the queen of personal weapons. The possession of a good rifle, as well as the skill to use it well, truly makes a man the monarch of all he surveys. It realizes the ancient dream of the Jovian thunderbolt, and as such it is the embodiment of personal power. For this reason it exercises a curious influence over the minds of most men, and in its best examples it constitutes an object of affection unmatched by any other inanimate object. — Jeff Cooper

From that imbalance rose the tragic results of the coming together of two worlds. It was the extermination of an ancient dream by the frenzy of a modern one, the destruction of myths by a desire for power. It was gold, modern weapons, and rational thought pitted against magic and gods: the outcome could not have been otherwise. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight. — G.A. Kulkarni

A thicket of summer grass / Is all that remains / Of the dreams of ancient warriors. — Matsuo Basho

Most people don't understand what a library does for me and I've tried to explain it to them. All I know is that I feel energized when I'm in one. My pulse quickens when I walk through the the stacks. I feel like an explorer surveying an uncharted shore. Lost worlds are here waiting to be discovered. Ancient worlds; once glorious, not crumbled. Future worlds; no more substantial than the numbers or ideas or words of those who dream them. Mythical worlds. Worlds of limitless dimensions.
Libraries are medieval forests masking opportunity and danger; every aisle is a path, every catalog reference a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. — Jack Cavanaugh

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison. — Angela Carter

The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity. — H.G.Wells

The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. — Neal Stephenson

Long drawn, the cool, green shadows
Steal o'er the lake's warm breast,
And the ancient silence follows
The burning sun to rest. The calm of a thousand summers,
And dreams of countless Junes,
Return when the lake-wind murmurs
Through golden August noons. — William Braithwaite

There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to "the best place in the world to run." Alone. — Christopher McDougall

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.
Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.
The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.
Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain. — Judith A. Wright

Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels,
but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to
renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass
over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the
forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been
incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to
exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until
history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will
lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless — Albert Camus

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past
we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. — Azar Nafisi

The dust to which this flesh shall return, it is the ancient dreaming dust of God. — John Mellencamp

Shall hope prevail where clamorous hate is rife,
Shall sweet love prosper or high dreams have place
Amid the tumult of reverberant strife
'Twixt ancient creeds, 'twixt race and ancient race,
That mars the grave, glad purposes of life,
Leaving no refuge save thy succoring face? — Sarojini Naidu

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction. — Sigmund Freud

Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone
glimmering through the dream of things that were; First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away
Is this the whole? — Lord Byron

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads. — Ben Lerner

It is impossible to restore the sustainable societies of indigenous and aboriginal peoples. But the values they embodied - careful stewardship of the earth, modest use of its riches, safeguarding the future of the generations to come, restraint and as high a degree of self-provisioning as possible - can reanimate ancient and still unrealized dreams of a secure sustenence for all. — Jeremy Seabrook

Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day.
C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit. — Gunduz Vassaf

A cave of scars!
ancient, archaic wallpaper
built up, layer on layer
from the earliest, dream-white
to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl
a red mouth slowly closing — Adrienne Rich

O Moon that rid'st the night to wake
Before the dawn is pale,
The hamadryad in the brake,
The Satyr in the vale,
Caught in thy net of shadows
What dreams hast thou to show?
Who treads the silent meadows
To worship thee below?
The patter of the rain is hushed,
The wind's wild dance is done,
Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushed
About the setting sun:
And now beneath thy argent beam
The wildwood standeth still,
Some spirit of an ancient dream
Breathes from the silent hill.

Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokes
The Ancient Ones of night,
Once more the old stone altar smokes,
The fire is glimmering bright.
Scattered and few thy children be,
Yet gather we unknown
To dance the old round merrily
About the time-worn stone.
We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell,
Nor mourn our outcast lot,
Treading the mazes of a spell
By priests and men forgot. — Gerald Gardner

And there were moments in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of everything I was capable of, I was somehow kin to every mortal. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul. Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when each kiss was the pefect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and agian. — Anne Rice

He was dead; I needed to let his memory go, too. That was the first step for me, before discrimination.
Yet my love was the ghost of a young girl's dream. It walked alone in the abyss, stubbornly, where only illusions prospered on tears and regrets. My love had a life of its own; it was perverted but nevertheless still vital. For that reason, I wanted to return to deep space. Honestly, I would have preferred it if we had traveled forever and never stopped at another star system. To fall into endless blackness, that was my new fantasy.
The young girl with the ancient dream wept. I could hear her; I even saw her tears on the glass of the observation deck. It made me feel old. I didn't want to know her name. I couldn't forget Tem but I needed to forget her. — Christopher Pike

Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream: a cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love. — Lucinda Franks

Down the ancient corridors through the gates of time, run the ghosts of dreams that we have left behind. — Dan Fogelberg

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind. — Paul Watzlawick

We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up. This can occur. Anyone who has lifted his blood into a years-long work may find that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity is irresistible, and it falls back, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all. — James Baldwin

come, ancient and unchanging night
Night, born as dethroned king,
Night, internally equal to silence, Night.
With sequins of volatile starlight
Woven on your robe with infinity
Come quietly
Come fleet-footed
Come alone. — Pierre Peju