Quotes & Sayings About Sleepwalkers

Annie watched them all walk together, like sleepwalkers, she thought, jackrabbits trying to outrun them. The two ends of the line pulled in to form a semicircle, a giant net of humanity. * — Rae Meadows

I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. — Ralph Ellison

Tanzie knew Nicky was thinking what she was thinking - that Mum had finally gone mad. But she had read somewhere that mad people were like sleepwalkers - it was best not to disturb them. So she nodded really slowly, like this was all making good sense. — Jojo Moyes

Kenzo glances up from his chopping. "You look good enough to eat."
"Don't tell that to Stu's sleepwalkers," I say. — Carolyn Crane

Maybe it's an artistic genius thing. People who go so deep inside themselves, especially when they're working, that they seem like sleepwalkers when they emerge. Traces of unconsciousness seem to cling to them, lending them an otherworldly sheen. — Susan Juby

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive. — Edward Hirsch

In a world of sleepwalkers an awakened mind is a teacher and a catalyst for new awakenings, whether they want to be or not. — Bryant McGill

From all around the Third World,
You hear the same story;
Rulers
Asleep to all things at
All times -
Conscious only of
Riches, which they gather in a
Coma -
Intravenously
So that
You wouldn't know they were
Feeding if it was not for the
Occasional
Tell-tale trickle somewhere
Around the mouth.
And when they are jolted awake,
They stare about them with
Unseeing eyes, just
Sleepwalkers in a nightmare. — Ama Ata Aidoo

For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air. — Janet Finch

The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the universal against the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect. — Milan Kundera

Suppose I were to be honest with you as I possibly could be, fooling you no more than I fool myself. Still, you wouldn't know me and I wouldn't know you, because no matter how much we cry for light, we are all sleepwalkers fumbling in the dark. Sometimes we manage to touch for a moment, than we pass". — Stirling Silliphant

But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. — Emily St. John Mandel

Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It's you that are the catastrophe, you're the bloody last judgement, your feet don't even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let's make a bet,' and here he shook Nadaban by the shoulders, 'that you don't even know what I'm talking about!! Because you don't talk, you "whisper" or "expostulate"; you don't walk down the street but "proceed feverishly"; you don't enter a place but "cross its threshold", you don't feel cold or hot, but "find yourselves shivering" or "feeling the sweat pour down you"! I haven't heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry "sorcery! — Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Almost anyone could be Fascist under the right circumstances. If they get scared enough. It's because, you see, most people live their lives like sleepwalkers. They're not really awake, though they think they are. And sleepwalkers are easily lead. That's why we have to fight so hard. Because it never quite goes away. — John Shirley

The clouds roll on. Silent as sleepwalkers the clouds keep coming from infinity bank behind bank and line after line, and change colors on the earth. — Rolf Jacobsen

All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all. — Ralph Ellison

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream? — Marguerite Yourcenar

Here's no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don't at least marginally understand our home. That is the understanding we need to put our lives in some bigger metaphysical context. Instead, Eustace sees a chilling sight- a citizenry so removed from the rhythm of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened, and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul. — Elizabeth Gilbert

They went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. — Peter Watts

Children...wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride,; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway. — Annie Dillard

Most men are not wicked. Men become bad and guilty because they speak and act without foreseeing the results of their words and their deeds. They are sleepwalkers, not evildoers. — Franz Kafka

Sleepwalkers, leave other sleepwalkers alone! — Jonathan Lethem

They became sleepwalkers in a world of half-dreams and rambling thoughts with no break in the wearing march or the never-ending, silent black trunks that came and passed in countless thousands. — Terry Brooks

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you. — George Orwell

In America, the border of the property would have been gated to keep children and sleepwalkers and drunkards from dropping to their deaths, but there was no division here between safety and stupidity: you had to draw those lines yourself. — Courtney Maum

adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite - " "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially." What — Emily St. John Mandel

The world is in the condition that it's in because the world is full of sleepwalkers. — Neale Donald Walsch

We sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We who conceal naturalness! We who are moon- and God-struck! We untiring wanderers, silent as death, on heights that we see not as heights but as our plains, as our safety. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The town was peopled with sleepwalkers, whose trance was broken only on the rare occasions when at night their wounds, to all appearance closed, suddenly reopened. Then, waking with a start, they would run their fingers over the wounds with a sort of absentminded curiosity, twisting their lips, and in a flash their grief blazed up again, and abruptly there rose before them the mournful visage of their love. In the morning they harked back to normal conditions, in other words, the plague. — Albert Camus