Quotes & Sayings About Dreams And Nightmares

Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare. — Salvador Dali

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. — Peter S. Beagle

Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time. — Ransom Riggs

You want me to stay with you tonight?"
She nodded. "It's not scary anymore
I mean, I'm home and it's all over. But I think it will be scary in my dreams, and I don't want to have nightmares."
"Okay then." He sat up straight, looking every bit the determined bodyguard. "In that case, I have to stay. And you don't have to worry because I'll protect you. I'll always protect you. — J. Kenner

For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe ... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers. — Robert A. Heinlein

But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question? — Douglas Coupland

Nightmares are not dreams. A good dream does not leave the dreamer in darkness, confusion and terror. Start having dreams, not nightmares! — Michael Bassey Johnson

What I don't think this man realizes is that he's giving my dreams
and my nightmares
a new name.
Brand. Alec Brand. — M. Leighton

He still had dreams about it. Certainly not nightmares - it could not be worth the energy. But every month or so he woke up from one of those annoying visions where he was back at school (rather absurdly at his current age of eight-and-twenty). It was always of a similar nature. He looked down at his schedule and suddenly realized he'd forgotten to attend Latin class for an entire term. Or arrived for an exam without his trousers. — Julia Quinn

Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a "narrative" in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of "insanity"? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? — Haruki Murakami

I don't want to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we're all mad here, and her mother really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn't come true, which meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow. — Stephen King

Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn't like being locked away. — Laini Taylor

A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternate world. Then they ceased communicating altogether. and began to liase in dreams and nightmares. — Will Self

Our artists have the power to bring our dreams and our nightmares to life so we will never forget. — Hetti Perkins

Hand to hand, no swords or staffs?"

"I figured that was the only fair way for us to fight." She crosses to the ladder and steps onto the top rung. "Seeing as I possess superior skill in armed combat."

I snort and reach for my pants, suddenly more inspired about this sparring match. "In your dreams, runt."

"In your nightmares," she says with a wink as she disappears down the ladder. — Stacey Jay

Nightmares are distinctly different from dreams in the way that people feel them and experience them. So a lot of people think that a nightmare is something where something is chasing them and you have to wake up screaming. Yes, that's one of the more common nightmares that we see is the person chasing someone or they're being chased. — Shelby Harris

Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.
She had said, What is that awful stench?
Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered. — Joanne Greenberg

The poets carry feelings, delivering desires and dispatching dreams. Even if sometimes they need pack some sorrows, distill several disappointments and filter strange nightmares. — J.B.Alves

With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls — Allen Ginsberg

The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne. — Jaime Allison Parker

Fairy tales are just true stories that humans have chosen not to believe in any more. Besides, this is Myths and Legends where dreams and nightmares come to life. — Stacie Simpson

You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other. — Carl Sagan

If nightmares can come true, and sometimes they do... then so can our happiest dreams. — Emma Chase

This I would wish, that there was no time or sleep. No more past, or future, and everything we did was good the first time, for the day. Without the need of looking back to learn from the past, and no future to hope for the better. No more tiredness, or having a need to dream, and no nightmares to fear. If there was a second time, this is how I would like to start over. — Anthony Liccione

It is a season of hopelessness, of being lost, of wishing I could turn to dust and melt with the rain. Dreams and nightmares swell into my world, blur my vision with the broken boundaries of reality. — Addison Moore

Humankind has always had access to Shadow
dreams, nightmares, legends, inspiration, Humanity taps into Shadow every day. And when we die, we pass into Twilight. — Erin Kellison

Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams. — Glenda Millard

The dreams are that you're gonna have a great series and win. The nightmares are that you're gonna let the winning run score on a ground ball through your legs. Those things happen, you know. I think a lot of it is just fate. — Bill Buckner

I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down ... who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable
there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions ... or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her. — Nenia Campbell

Spreading its wings, her love stretched out and touching his tangled, frozen soul and from the first word, became ensnared in its icy grip where it remained, intrinsically entwined within an alternating web of dreams and nightmares. Forever lost, forever lost... — Virginia Alison

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares ... heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled. — Joan D. Vinge

The Court of Dreams.
The people who knew that there was a price, and one worth paying, for that dream. The bastard- born warriors, the Illyrian half breed, the monster trapped in a beautiful body, the dreamer born into a court of nightmares ... And the huntress with an artist's soul. — Sarah J. Maas

I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there. — Neil Gaiman

My dreams are of water. And my nightmares. — Siouxsie Sioux

Of all the things I'd imagined in nightmares and dreams of dead things, the woman who gripped my leg was the worst and my last. — Brian Hodge

Turn your nightmares into your dreams , some dreams don't turn out the way you want them to , then wake up and turn and turn it around in your favour. — Salman Khan

We are more than the person who wakes each day. We are the dreams of the previous night and the nightmares of the week before. — Shaun Hick

Nightmares are like Master Harriot's star glass. They are a trick of the light, one that makes something distant seem closer and larger than it really is." "Oh." Jack considered Matthew's response. "So even if I see a monster in my dreams, it cannot reach me?" Matthew nodded. "But I will tell you a secret. A dream is a nightmare in reverse. If you dream of someone you love, that person will seem closer, even if far away. — Deborah Harkness

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war. — Elaine Pagels

Love can be the greatest of dreams and the worst of nightmares. — William Shakespeare

You know what the really scary thing about bad dreams? It's that something's going on in your head, and you can't control it. I mean, It's like there's these bad worlds inside you. But it's just you ... it's like you're betraying yourself. — Neil Gaiman

When you love someone, they becomes a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them. — Cassandra Clare

I'm not sure why the saying goes ... "be careful what you wish for" ... it should be, "prepare yourself for your wishes". We need to know ahead of time to prepare for what we wish for, so that when our wishes come true, we don't regret the wish or have them turn into nightmares. — C. Nzingha Smith

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? — John Lennon

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically
any way you want to look at it
everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. — Michael Connelly

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

His eyes darkened. "You're in pain, aren't you?" He touched her temple, and she leaned her head against his hand.
"Yes." The inside of her head felt stuffed full like an iron band slowly tightened around her brain.
"Still having bad dreams?"
"Nightmares." She put her palms flat to his chest and spoke to the buttons on his coat. "Always the same. A face looming over me. I can't breathe. I feel helpless. And frightened."
"Hush, my heart." His fingertips nudged her chin up so that she looked into his face. "Hush."
She leaned against him. "Why can't I remember?"
"It isn't time, yet." His hands landed on her shoulders. — Carolyn Jewel

Mary fell asleep early, but her dreams were most unpleasant. She was a mouse running across the kitchen floor, and Elizabeth was a sharp-clawed cat waiting silently to pounce. Then she was a wild deer being chased by famished dogs. Elizabeth was a laughing huntsman in black velvet, urging the ravenous pack onward with a whip. And then Mary was her true self, barefoot and in a bedgown, attempting to escape by night. But the castle was dark and the halls were a winding maze. Mary ran down long shadowy corridors, panting and out of breath, but at every turn she ran into blank walls or locked doors. At last she managed to yank open a door, expecting to breathe the sweet air of freedom. But the way was blocked by laughing faces, all of them growing larger and larger while Mary got smaller and smaller. There was Elizabeth ... and Dudley ... and Cecil ... and Walsingham ... and their loud laughter filled her ears, drowning her pleas like ocean waves. — Margaret George

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible. — Neil Gaiman

And we are such stuff as dreams are made. Or nightmares. I — Mark Henwick

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food
and love, but they were pleasant rather
than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography. — Elizabeth Bishop

But I understood, now, that we don't live only for ourselves. We're connected by millions of shared experiences and dreams and nightmares, all tied together with compassion.
I learned that even when we're going through our darkest winter, spring is waiting to appear. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Close the day with prayer so that you may have a peaceful night free from dreams and nightmares. — Mahatma Gandhi

Kevin knew he had to always outrun the enemy inside him, and if that meant playing football, he'd do it. During puberty, he had taken off running and found too late that he couldn't stop. In dreams that turned into nightmares he ran in fear, ripped from sleep in a sweat, shouting,"Run! — Brenda Sutton Rose

Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.
That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.
("Out Of The Deep") — Walter De La Mare

Recognize the difference between a dream and a nightmare, and date the man from your dreams, not your nightmares. — Jenna Alatari

May your dreams be sweet and your nightmares be spooky-monster-scary and not grandma-died-scary. — Donald Glover

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ... — Doris Lessing

It can't all be dreams because a broken dream will kill you as surely as a nightmare will, and with a lot less mercy. At least the nightmares don't smile while they take you down. — Seanan McGuire

Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares. — Marcel Proust

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer
both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams. — Bram Stoker

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed. — Jack London

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Because the world is unkind, and eventually, it will swallow you whole, turning your hopes into shattered dreams, and your dreams into nightmares. — Mia Asher

It seems to me that after someone sweeps across your life like a red-hot flame, peeling back the shutters that sat over your heart and your mind and setting free your sweetest dreams or your worst nightmares, after things cool down you've got two choices. You can either slip back into your old self, your old life, tucking those things you were too scared to look at back into hiding, or you can keep those parts of yourself out until you get so used to them that they don't scare you anymore and they just become a part of who you are. — Sandra Kring

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

It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. — Richard Russo

In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing. — Holly Hunter

I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people's nightmares. — Bauvard

WAKE
Dealing with an alcoholic single mother and endless hours of working at Heather Nursing Home to raise money for college, high-school senior Janie Hannagan doesn't need more problems. But inexplicably, since she was eight years old, she has been pulled in to people's dreams, witnessing their recurring fears, fantasies and secrets. Through Miss Stubin at Heather Home, Janie discovers that she is a dream catcher with the ability to help others resolve their haunting dreams. After taking an interest in former bad boy Cabel, she must distinguish between the monster she sees in his nightmares and her romantic feelings for him. And when she learns more about Cabel's covert identity, Janie just may be able to use her special dream powers to help solve crimes in a suspense-building ending with potential for a sequel. McMann lures teens in by piquing their interest in the mysteries of the unknown, and keeps them with quick-paced, gripping narration and supportive characters. — Lisa McMann

It was a time of dark dreams. They washed in like flotsam on the night tide, slipping beneath doorways and window latches, rising through the streets and hills; and the little fishing-town of Scarlock foundered deep. — J.A. Clement

to all those who slept through the nightmare till it ended, you will remember your nightmares and it will be easier to confront them when they come again for you. — Sherif Mekdam

The only way to stop a nightmare is to open your eyes, if perchance you realize you were dreaming — Bangambiki Habyarimana

I have a body too young and a mind full of years. Everything in me has witnessed its own ending. I have lived through nightmares and perished in blissful dreams. What all that's left - eats me from within but still melts me from without, and that is where my humility takes birth. — Akif Kichloo

Herlia, goddess of justice, weeping as she passes her first judgement (...) She fell in love with a mortal man, but his passion for her drove him to commit a terrible crime and so she judged him, consigning him to the depths of the earth, chained to a rock, where his flesh is eternally eaten by vermin (...) Indeed, he stole a magic sword and with it slew a god, thinking him a rival for her affections. In fact he was her brother, Ixtus, god of dreams. now, whenever we suffer nightmares it is the shade of the fallen god taking his revenge on mortal kind. — Anthony Ryan

Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams. — Karen Blixen

*** You know that place in between nightmares and dreams? The place where tomorrows never come and yesterdays don't hurt anymore? The place where your heart beats in sync with mine? The place where time doesn't exist, and it's easy to breathe? I want to live there with you. — Brittainy C. Cherry

I do have the odd dream where I'm on stage and I've completely forgotten what I'm meant to be performing - so they are more nightmares than dreams. — Kate Bush

He groaned and leaned his forehead against hers, "You drive me mad, Elizabeth. I dream I am holding you every night. I wake in a sweat, aching and disappointed. Dreams of you have replaced my nightmares, but they leave me empty and restless and my body on fire. I can't even remember why we argued. I don't care how things went wrong. — Judith James

That night, he laid in his bed thinking about all the possibilities. They came like waves in his mind. At first they came slow, then gradually built up speed, cresting into full on dreams, until finally, they broke onto the shore with all of their reality. First dreams, then nightmares. — Brian Joyce

Nightmares and secrets. Ewan wished he knew what had happened to these girls before he found them. — C.J. Milbrandt

I woke with sweat beading across my forehead and my hands balled into fists clutching the sheet over my eyes. The dreams. They were back. Haunting me relentlessly. I thought they were gone ... I should've known better. (Rayne) — Kimberly Brockman

Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It's been the breaker of many a man's dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence. — Stephen Richards

The woman of my dreams. The woman of my nightmares. Everything good and bad about my life. The "I do" that "I didn't. — Chris Fabry

'And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In the end, I suppose they'll wish I hadn't dreamed at all.' — Pierce Brown

Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for. — Mike A. Lancaster

There were dragons, in his dreams, as though some part of him knew the trials were not yet over, that there were battles yet to be fought. He slept fitfully, fidgeting, tossing and turning, groaning and crying out in his sleep. — Barry Lyga

Believe me, young lady, when I tell you that there is no place for you in his world of ghosts and nightmares - no place for your fresh beauty or your unmarred dreams, no place for your wonderful hope. He can bring you nothing, because he has lost everything. Don't try to keep him, to tie him down, because if you succeed, if he weakens, he will hate you for it. Let him be. He is not unhappy; he is resigned. He has surrendered and acquired at a high cost a deep understanding of life. — Hannah Fielding

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time ... — David Foster Wallace

Dreams are not lands of happiness. It is miscomprehended that bad dreams are nightmares. In truth, the only dreams we have are nightmares. When you are asleep, your brain wanders, bringing up thoughts of hopes and fears. During the night, thoughts of fear are what haunt you. Dreams are nightmares. Hopeful dreams are your wishes that will most likely never come true, which are their own form of nightmares. — Mandi Lynn

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares. — Susan Sontag

Ghosts

Take shape under moonlight,
materialize in dreams.
Shadows. Silhouettes
of what is no more. But

ghosts don't

bother me. The day brings
bigger things to worry about
than flimsy remains of
yesterday. No, spooks don't

scare me.

Gauzy apparitions might
prank your psyche or
agitate your nightmares,
but lacking

flesh and blood

they are powerless
to hurt you-cannot hope
to inflict the kind of damage
that real, live

people do. — Ellen Hopkins

Her voice never stops: even when I sleep, it is a shining silver thread running through most of my dreams and all my nightmares, whispering, beseeching, threatening: One word from you is all I want. Just speak one word, and we'll begin. Name, rank, and serial number, perhaps the misquoted lyrics from a popular song: anything will do. From there we'll move with slow cautious steps to gentle verbal sparring, twice-told tales, descriptions of the scarred and darkest places of our old and worn-out souls. I'll love you back; I'll tell you secrets - — Dexter Palmer

This. I live in this place, make porridge, scrub toilets, do laundry, and for days, weeks, I am brave and I do get out of bed and I think on this. I study this, the full life, the being fully ready for the end. I start to think that maybe there is a way out of nightmares to dreams? Maybe? — Ann Voskamp

I read obsessively to escape my own world. To live the dreams of others when, for so long, the reoccurrence of my nightmares has been my reality. I read to fall in love and find a happily ever after, even if it is purely imagined. With each story I read, I'm able to live and love vicariously through the characters in my books. It's the only plausible way for me to survive. — L.B. Simmons

... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.) — Carlos Fuentes

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams. — Jonas Salk

When you wake up from a nightmare, the reality comforts you. When you wake up from the best dream ever, reality is a burden, a slap-in-the-face reminder that you could feel this, you could have this, but you don't and you won't. — Karina Halle