Dreaming Books Quotes & Sayings

Anyone can write. Some people can write a bit better than others; they're called authors. Then there are some who can write better than authors; they're called artists. — Walter Moers

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know...
M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute "M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met — M.M. Bennetts

So this is your library, huh, Lucien? It's a big place What's so special about it, then?"
"Oh, it's a very unusual library, Matthew. Somewhere in here is every story that has every been dreamed. "
"They're just books."
"Oh yes. But unusual books. You'll find none of them on Earth. In this section, for example, are novels their authors never wrote, or never finished, except in dreams. — Neil Gaiman

Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been like that. — Walter Moers

Reality is painful and imperfect ... That's just the way it is, that's how we distinguish it from dreams. When something seems absolutely lovely we think it can only be a dream, and we pinch ourselves just to be sure we're really not dreaming - if it hurts it's because we're not dreaming. Reality can hurt us, even those moments when it may seem to us to be a dream. You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes truer in colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books, my son, you must choose books — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath. — Paul Kropp

The path to success involves two parts. Part One is all about imagination and dreaming up a big idea. Part Two is all about having the diligence, the determination, and the tenacity needed to turn those dreams into reality. First comes the inspiration, then comes the perspiration. — Clay Clark

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. — Alberto Manguel

We live and breathe words ... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt
I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted
and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. — Cassandra Clare

I now understood the secret of music and knew what makes it so infinitely superior to all the other arts: its incorporeality. Once it has left an instrument it becomes its own master, a free and independent creature of sound, weightless, incorporeal and perfectly in tune with the universe. — Walter Moers

I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we're alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt-I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted-and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still. — Cassandra Clare

Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming. — Fernando Pessoa

Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties. — Walter Moers

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading. — Rikki Ducornet

This makes it tough to find a lot of solid material on him because so much of his work got discounted as irrelevant. Most of it just ends up buried in pseudo-science books. Pretty much the only place you can find him is lumped in with guys like Edgar Cayce or Immanuel Velikovsky. He believed in telepathy, shared dreaming, race memories, all that kind of stuff. The idea that people's minds can all connect on some extra-sensory level. — Peter Clines

Once there was a dictator. He drove millions to various kinds of deaths, by war, in prison, or simply in harsh deserts farming their lives away. He destroyed temples, burned books, and ruined the art of calligraphy. He wrote terrible poetry and forced everyone to learn it, so destroying the literary taste of one quarter of humanity. He remained a warrior even as Chairman. He was at his best as a warrior, because as a warrior, he was fighting for his people, dreaming for them. After that, he only ground them down. But I forgive him for saying one beautiful thing:
'Women hold up half the sky.'
Chairman Mao Tse Tung — Geoff Ryman

No one who writes a good book is really dead. — Walter Moers

She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. "I'm going to miss you when I wake up," she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.
"Don't wake up," he said. — Marie Rutkoski

The Age of the Screen isn't going to go away; indeed it offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities, if it could just acquire a little more quality control. But there is one truth, one necessary dictum, that we must never forget: _Every child should be encouraged to read books, words on a page, for his or her own pleasure, in his own time, dreaming his own - and the author's - dream_. There is no substitute. None. — Susan Cooper

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles
a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are. — Alberto Manguel

Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give a shape to so much pain. — Joyce Carol Oates

There's nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it's shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn't return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it's unbearably boring. I'll tell you what's exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn't dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad. — Steve Toltz

In my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books. — Lisa Factora-Borchers

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about. — Laini Taylor

Finally, I couldn't imagine how I could live without books, and I stopped dreaming about marrying that Chinese prince ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools - all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream. — Azar Nafisi

When I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go
home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase — Bohumil Hrabal

When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building. — Janet Fitch

Waiting to be discovered, hoping to be seen, wishing someone else would do the work, wanting to make it big while dreaming of being rich and famous just like your heroes is submissive, passive, foolish, weak, and ineffective. Take your desire for your dreams, your goals, and your ambition, then make them fuel for the fire to light your ass up, to get to work and on the path to make it happen. — Loren Weisman

There's a reason for every journey, and mine was prompted by boredom and the recklessness of youth, by a wish to break the bounds of my normal existence and familiarise myself with life and the world at large. — Walter Moers

I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one. — Walter Moers

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. — Anna Quindlen

Lucas Benes lay in a sleeping bag on the roof of his father's hotel, dreaming about a past he couldn't remember. — Paul Aertker