Never Too Old To Dream Quotes & Sayings

It's the Longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside like rot and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you. The Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It's the gloss on a lover's lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. If you know the Longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I. — Matthew Sturges

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. — Joyce Carol Oates

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise
the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer. — Milan Kundera

It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more. — Hermann Hesse

Don't be afraid to start dreaming new dreams.You're never too old to dream a new dream. — Brittainy C. Cherry

You are never too old to dream, keep dreaming like never before and you're never too young to dream, so young people go for it don't hesitate; dream again and again. — Euginia Herlihy

Dreams never die. Sometimes you think they are dead, but they are just hibernating lie some old bear. And, if the dream has been hibernating for a long time, that bear is going to wake up grumpy and hungry — Harlan Coben

You will never be too old to dream because God will stop the sun for you to enjoy the fruits of your labour. — Euginia Herlihy

Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been. — Lord Dunsany

Nobody is ever too old to dream. And dreams never grow old. — L.M. Montgomery

MY MOST CONSTANT and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents. It's a recurring dream which persists even now. What's more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I've dreamed I'm in that huge old house. Not that I've gone back there but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason - as if I'd never left it. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door. — Gerald Martin

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. — Marilynne Robinson

When I was extremely young and shockingly stupid, I thought you weren't supposed to ever get angry at anybody you cared about (lest you suspect I'm exaggerating the "shockingly stupid" part, I also thought Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon). I honestly believed that people who were truly in love would never dream of having a good, old-fashioned, knock-down, drag-out fight. I guess when you're the type of girl who walks around thinking that the wind just sort of sculpted Teddy Roosevelt into the side of a mountain, the concept of a fairy-tale relationship makes total sense. — Lisa Kogan

Wet. I'd much rather have God part the river, and then I'll step into the miracle. That way I don't get my feet wet, but if we aren't willing to get our feet wet, we'll never walk through parted rivers on dry ground. At flood tide, the Jordan River was approximately two hundred feet wide. That was all that separated the Israelites from their four-hundred-year-old promise. Their dream was practically a stone's throw away. But if the priests hadn't stepped into the river, they may well have spent the rest of their lives on the eastern banks of the Jordan River. And that's where many of us spend our lives. We're so close to the dream, so close to the promise, so close to the miracle. But we're waiting for God to part the river, while God is waiting for us to get our feet wet. — Mark Batterson

You can make anything by writing.-
You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream. — C.S. Lewis

Once, when I was a child, I dreamed that Grimbeard the Ghastly, on the deck of his ship The Endless Journey, threw the sword Endeavor up into the air. Up and up it spun, through the inky blackness, across the cavernous span of a hundred years, until, entirely of its own accord, my own left hand sprang out of space and stars and never-ending time and caught it. Now that I am so very old, I am dreaming once again. And in my dream, I am the one throwing the sword. It is spinning now, in the black starlit waters of my dream, right above your head, dear reader. A sword that may look second-best, and secondhand, but but carries the memories of a thousand lost fights, a history lesson in itself. Reach out, and catch it by the hilt. Swear by its name, Endeavor, to do your utmost to make the world a better place than when you arrived in it. For look! There will be dragons all around you, as camouflaged as a Stealth Dragon. — Cressida Cowell

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think. — Lillian Smith

The best thing for disturbances of the spirit is to learn. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then
to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the poor mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. — T.H. White

I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I'll admit, that's what I was expecting to find at Oneida. The 19th century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch - a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of 'needles nourishing the earth'. The week before I went to Oneida, I had that claustrophobic dream again - that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be 'Muffin Day!' even though tomorrow was never Muffin Day. It was Muffin Day maybe once. — Sarah Vowell

What in the seven levels of hell did my son see in this place?" Horace asks.
We're standing on the street on Thursday morning, staring up at the house, after taking inventory of the place. From here, I can see five different spots where the brick needs to be repaired and pick out where shingles are missing on the sloped roof. The porch sags, and the windows are dingy. But if I let my eyes go out of focus and ignore all that, I can kinda picture what the place might look like after a little - never mind - a lot of TLC.
"It has good bones?" I suggest.
"It's got old bones," he mutters.
I smirk. "Yeah? So do you. Doesn't mean they're all bad."
He smacks my arm, but he's grinning. "Just wait till you get to be my age, and then tell me how good old bones are. — Erica Cameron

The old folks say there is only black and white. That may do for their tidy lives, but it doesn't apply to all of us. We, Supergirls for real and the wretched creature at my feet, live in the gray and the mist. We may never see the stars, but we believe in the dream of them. — Mav Skye

What more she said, or what de Crucis answered, he could never afterward recall. He had a confused sense of having cried out a last unavailing protest, faintly, inarticulately, like a man struggling to make himself heard in a dream; then the room grew dark about him, and in its stead he saw the old chapel at Donnaz, with its dimly-gleaming shrine, and heard the voice of the chaplain, harsh and yet strangely shaken: - "My chief prayer for you is that, should you be raised to this eminence, it may be at a moment when such advancement seems to thrust you in the dust." Odo lifted his head and saw de Crucis standing alone before him. "I am ready," he said. — Edith Wharton

Damn it, it wasn't right. When she lay abed at night, she shouldn't see charging boars and violent tussles. She should dream of the scent of night-blooming jasmine and the texture of organdy and the distant strains of an orchestra playing a stately sarabande. As he had, all those freezing, damp nights.
As he would, in all the bitter years to come.
What had she called him, last night? An insufferable, arrogant cad. Yes, he was.
He wanted Cecily pining for him forever, dreaming she could tame him, yearning for the tender love he could never, ever give.
He wanted her to remember the old Luke, not fantasize about some uncivilized beast.
And if this "werestag" had eclipsed the memory of their kiss with his gory midnight rescue . . .
Luke just would have to do it one better, and give Cecily a new memory to occupy her thoughts. An experience she could never forget. — Tessa Dare

Sam Jackson is a director's dream. Some actors hope to find their character during shooting. He knows his character before shooting. Sam's old-school. I just got out of his way. I never did more than two takes with Sam.-william friedkin — William Friedkin

It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it. — Charles Dickens

When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Love of freedom is this:
Once you're tempted there's no escape,
It's a habit that never gets old,
A dream that is truer than reality. — Oktay Rifat

But then I stopped allowing myself to dream, because it was more painful to long for things and never get them than to deal with whatever was in front of me. [ ... ] I'm too old to hear confront nonsense anymore. Too old to believe that everything will be alright. — Veronica Roth

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. — Ayn Rand

He had that sense, or inward prophecy,
which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,
that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

But now I was tired of having desired too much. I suddenly felt old. I should never recover from the wound in my breast. The dream of peace that I had had a moment before attracted and tempted me only because it was far away. Had I realised it, I should simply have dreamed another dream. — Henri Barbusse

The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields. — Ernst Junger

You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream. — C.S. Lewis

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn. — T.H. White

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

They say that dogs may dream, and when Topsy was old, his feet would move in his sleep. With his eyes closed he would often make a noise that sounded quite human, as if greeting someone in his dreams. At first it seemed that he believed Sara would return, but as the years went by I understood that his loyalty asked for no reward, and that love comes in unexpected forms. His wish was small, as hers had been
merely to be beside her. As for me, I already knew I would never get what I wanted. — Alice Hoffman

Well, since I'm six years old, I've been playing the violin, the piano, I've been singing. It's always been a dream of mine, but I really never had the courage to actually go and do it professionally. — Paris Hilton

If you have a dream as a child, but you let it go cold, you will grow old only to realize that you have sold your gold for no royalty! — Israelmore Ayivor

Emma: What do you want from me, Jules? What do you want me to do?
Jules: What do I want? I want you to know what it's like. To be tortured al the time, night and day, desperately wanting what you know you should never want, what doesn't even want you back. to know how it feels to understand that a decision you made when you were twelve years old means you can never have the one thing that would make you truly happy. I want you to dream about only one thing and want onlny one thing and obsess about only one thing like I do ...
Emma: Julian...
Jules: ... like I do with you! Like I do with you, Emma. I thought you loved me. I don't know how I got that so wrong. — Cassandra Clare

I will do everything I can to be the man that you want, the man that the seven-year-old you used to dream about. I will bring you flowers, I'll take care of you when you're sick, I'll give you space when you need it and I'll never leave your side when you want someone there. I want to be better than I am because of you, Paisley. — Kandi Steiner

May you never grow too old to believe in magic and fairy tales. — Misty Dawn Seidel

I met someone the other night who's 28 years old, and he hasn't worked a day since he left college because he's pursuing a dream he'll never, ever realize: He thinks he's a great singer. Actually, he's crap. — Simon Cowell

Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring. Not now or ever. Retire? The word is alien and the idea inconceivable to me. I don't believe in retirement for anyone in my type of work, not while the spirit remains. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. To "retire" means to me to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again.
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. — Pablo Casals

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash. — Carl Sandburg

You're never too old to chase your dream. — Diana Nyad

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

He told her that he had got into acting by way of his religion. His family belonged to some Christian sect Greta had never heard of. This sect was not numerous but very rich, or at least some of them were. They had built a church with a theater in it in a town on the prairie. That was where he started to act before he was ten years old. They did parables from the Bible but also present day, about the awful things that happened to people who didn't believe what they did. His family was very proud of him and of course so he was of himself. He wouldn't dream of telling them all that went on when the rich converts came to renew their vows and get revitalized in their holiness. Anyway he really liked getting all the approval and he liked the acting. Till one day he just got the idea that he could do the acting and not go through all that church stuff. — Alice Munro

That impossible dream you dreamed when you were young but got talked out of, the one you thought you outgrew, might be the key to awakening your genius. That special talent you never followed through on might be an important source of delight, the one you should commit to. That old dream might be the one thing that will bring the magic of meaning to your life. — Mark Victor Hansen

Who I am finally, if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself? — Anne Desclos

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular
especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. — Hunter S. Thompson

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'. — Pope John Paul II

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house; for when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen -- a life spent with the odours of other people's dinners in one's nostrils, and the noise of their wrangling servants in one's years, and parties and tattle for all amusement. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

EMBRACE Will you walk in my garden Our hands to hold? Will we never be parting If we ever grow old? Will you stay with me As bad arises? Life writes its own rules Some with nasty surprises. When the sun no longer Smiles on my face Will your love be stronger As I dream in your Embrace? A poem by Karen Lyons Kalmenson — David Mezzapelle