The Great Awake Quotes & Sayings

Brain Juice was a recipe invented by Eve years before, when she had had to stay awake all day to look after Caddy and Indigo and Saffron, and all night to take care of the fragile and impermanent baby Rose. It was Coca-Cola with a great deal of instant coffee stirred into it. It was black and frothy and gritty, and it tasted like a primitive, medieval poison, but it banished sleep like magic. — Hilary McKay

Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep? — Swami Vivekananda

Melisande lay in bed in the loft of her cottage in Graebrok Forest north of Odr. Wide awake and blinking in the dark, she listened to the mice above her head. Nearly a moon past, her swordsman had repaired a crack in the eaves before returning to the towers and yards of Merhafr, the great port on the Njorth Sea, where he served as a King's Ranger. His name was Othin, taken from a god of wisdom, trickery and war. What such a one knew of carpentry, well, that was open to question. But he knew other things. Nice things. — F.T. McKinstry

Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher's knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake. — Mark Haddon

One thing that keeps me awake at night: I am a mother and, I have to confess with great delight, a grandmother of five girls, which gives me great hope for the future - girl power! Can I say that without alienating all of the men? — Queen Noor Of Jordan

It feels great to wake up feeling healthy, awake and alert. I love waking up in the morning, taking a
deep breath, reading the newspaper and going to the gym - as opposed to carrying a hangover right
until lunch. That's horrible. It is nice to let off steam once in a while, but I find myself less involved with
people in that sense. I like staying at home, reading a book, having a chat with my wife, a quiet dinner
and going to bed early. I don't want to drink half a bottle of whisky and look 50 the next day. I have
become an anti-drinking, anti-smoking agent. — Saif Ali Khan

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture - the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us - has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you. — Edward Hirsch

Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams. — Lew Wallace

Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini. — Nick Hornby

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

Many do not recognize the fact as they ought, that Satan has got men fast asleep in sin and that it is his great device to keep them so. He does not care what we do if he can do that. We may sing songs about the sweet by and by, preach sermons and say prayers until doomsday, and he will never concern himself about us, if we don't wake anybody up. But if we awake the sleeping sinner he will gnash on us with his teeth. This is our work - to wake people up. — Catherine Booth

He who dreams ... does not know he is dreaming ... Only when he awakens does he know he has dreamt. But there is also the great awakening (ta-chiao), and then we see that [everything] here is nothing but a great dream. Of course, the fools believe that they are already awake-what foolishness! Confucius and you, both of you, are dreams; and I, who tell you this, am also a dream. — Zhuangzi

Florentino Ariza was awake most of the night, thinking that he heard the voice of Fermina Daza in the fresh river breeze, ministering to his solitude with her memory, hearing her sing in the respiration of the boat as it moved like a great animal in the darkness. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Motherhood is a great honor and privilege, yet it is also synonymous with servanthood. Every day women are called upon to selflessly meet the needs of their families. Whether they are awake at night nursing a baby, spending their time and money on less-than-grateful teenagers, or preparing meals, moms continuously put others before themselves. — Charles Stanley

For TOO LONG you have allowed the past to affect you!
For TOO LONG you have taken personally what others say about you!
For TOO LONG you have stood on the sidelines watching others thrive!
For TOO MANY NIGHTS you have gone to bed worrying about what may be.
For TOO LONG you have held a fear in your heart.
For TOO LONG you have settled for second best!!
NOW is the time to awaken!
NOW is the time to shine!
NOW is the time to ACCEPT that you are DIVINE!!
This is my message for you - allow it to touch the deepest parts of your being - to help you awaken to the truth - that you do deserve to live a GREAT life - and whatever that means for you! — Lee-Anne Peters

My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence. — Antonio Machado

Presently [Bridey] said: "If I was Rex" - his mind seemed full of such suppositions: "If I was Archbishop of Westminster," "If I was head of the Great Western Railway," "If I was an actress," as though it were a mere trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any morning to find the matter adjusted - "if I was Rex I should want to live in my constituency. — Evelyn Waugh

Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come! — John Muir

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret. — Hermann Hesse

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:
O great wide beautiful wonderful World
With the wonderful waters around you curled
And the beautiful grass upon your breast
O World you are beautifully dressed. — John Crowley

And so I lay awake, smoking and reflecting on many things, but, being of a practical turn of mind, chiefly on how we were to give those Masai villains the slip. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and, notwithstanding the mosquitoes, and the great risk we were running from fever from sleeping in such a spot, and forgetting that I had the cramp very badly in my right leg from squatting in a constrained position in the canoe, and that the Wakwafi who was sleeping beside me smelt horribly, I really began to enjoy myself. The moonbeams played upon the surface of the running water that speeded unceasingly past us towards the sea, like men's lives towards the grave, till it glittered like a wide sheet of silver, that is in the open where the trees threw no shadows. Near the banks, however, it was very dark, and the night wind sighed sadly in the reeds. — H. Rider Haggard

TS Was there a sense when you looked at each of these dreams that there was some kind of resolution occurring? ADYA Yes. Not only a resolution there, but also a resolution now. Because it's all one thing. Because anything that was unresolved in one of those dreams was unresolved now. Because it's the same; there's a connection. One of the reasons I haven't talked much about past lives is that some people who are extraordinarily awake have never seen a past life at all. Being aware of past lives is not a necessity. I'm not a particularly mystical person. There was a relatively short period of time, a few months, when I had these kinds of experiences happen occasionally, and since then, every now and then, but not with any great consistency. So they don't need to happen; it's just that they did — Adyashanti

The price that must be paid for mastery is discipline. No one achieves lasting success without it. So from the moment you awake each day, devote yourself to the perfection of whatever you pursue. Do this and you will achieve self-mastery. Achieve self-mastery and you will have the makings of a great leader ... Discipline is all about cultivating powerful habits that become part of your lifestyle. — Robin Crow

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. — Victor Hugo

Troy closed the file with a sigh.
"Bowen , you awake? I'm not going through this twice."
Bowen held up his middle finger.
"Great. Thanks for joining us. — Tessa Bailey

My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't. — Ian McEwan

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia. — Antal Szerb

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. "Emotional" is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. — C.S. Lewis

I have lain awake in the darkness many nights
Thinking of poems, going to sleep on poems,
Finally,with the darkness closing on
The bright remembered words. I have thought of the darkness
Closing on the world, the words of the poems forgotten,
All the great beautiful words of the poems
Fading from the mind of the world, let go
Slowly, unknowingly, as from the mind
Of one diseased the light of man's endeavor
Fades to the idiot darkness and is lost.
Part of the darkness, I have lain awake
Watching the poems of the world fade out like stars. — Charles E. Butler

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:
A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay'd
By your/their indiff'rence in the dank brown shade
Below the garden ...
His mind's eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship. — Edward Gorey

Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: "Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.'If I should die,' said I to myself,'I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.'" "If I had had time" - this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We — Will Durant

It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [ ... ] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [ ... ] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene. — Mark Twain

Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake." And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife's room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows. — Leo Tolstoy

When sinners are careless and stupid, and sinking into hell unconcerned, it is time the church should bestir themselves. It is as much the duty of the church to awake, as it is for the firemen to awake when a fire breaks out in the night in a great city. — Charles Grandison Finney

If humans did not manufacture some of their own to appear like better people, people would not aspire to be someone else. They would stop dreaming. And if people didn't dream, they would be awake to discover the wonderful misery of being. There are no singular great people. There is only a small percentage of people manufactured to look significant, for the purpose of creating the feeling of mass insignificance. — Craig Stone

Around him the chorus had begun, great swarms of creatures that he guessed to be insects, frogs maybe, everything else in this infernal country that had a voice. Why night? he thought. They don't say a thing all day long. The sun goes down and they have some kind of contest to see who can croak and buzz the loudest. Just to keep us awake, I guess. Revenge for slapping at them all day, killing their cousins. — Jeff Shaara

If a new movement in art comes along be awake to it, study it, but don't belong to it. Have a personal humor about things. You will never know your calibre until you have tried yourself. Avoid idle industry. Always leave out the padding. Be venturesome. Try new things that appeal to you. Examine others. Have a pioneer spirit. Prevent your drawing from being common. Put life into it. The way to do this is to see the model, see that the model is great, wonderful - a human creature there before you in the tragedy and comedy of life - then draw. — Robert Henri

Although psychotherapy and writing are distinct in many ways, they are two fields whose great resource is the vast plains of the unconscious mind and how this landscape gets translated into words. As a writer, you are often asking your mind to dream while awake, and if remembering dreams is difficult in general, then it seems to follow that it would be sometimes grueling to conjure up the murky depths on call, eyes open. (Robert M. Young) calls it madness, which is a strong word, but it's not a bad one in exaggeration, because he's talking about creating a safe and bound space in which to explore all sorts of darknesses that collect in the recesses of the mind. He's talking about what we do not understand, or know about, or have control over. And the unconscious, if treated well, is the writer's very good friend. Allowing it room is crucial. Allowing it structure can be the safest way to access it without feeling overwhelmed. — Aimee Bender

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Wakefulness is the way to life.
The fool sleeps
As if he were already dead,
But the Master is awake
And he lives forever.
He watches.
He is clear.
How happy he is!
For he sees that wakefulness is life.
How happy he is,
Following the path of the awakened.
With Great perseverance
He meditates, seeking
Freedom and happiness. — Gautama Buddha

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence. — Muriel Spark

I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.
Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me. — W.B.Yeats

There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it. — Richard Livingstone

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings — Fernando Pessoa

My heart is c steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast! I will sing and make melody! 8 d Awake, e my glory! [2] Awake, f O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn! 9 I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations. 10 For your g steadfast love is great to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. 11 x Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth! — Anonymous

If you promise to be good Paul you can have a piece of birthday cake but you won't have to eat any of the special candle so he promised to be good because he didn't want to be forced to eat any of the special candle but also because mostly because surely because Annie was great Annie was good let us thank her for our food including that we don't have to eat girls just wanna have fun but something wicked this way comes please don't make me eat my thumb Annie the mom Annie the goddess when Annie's around you better stay honest she knows when you've been sleeping she knows when you're awake she knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goddess' sake you better not cry you better not pout but most of all you better not scream don't scream don't scream don't scream don't He — Stephen King

Become aware, awake. Then you will see that everything comes and goes, all things come and pass. Life is a flux. Your consciousness is the only thing that is immovable, that is eternal. To attain it is freedom. To attain it is the goal of life. If you miss it you have missed your life and you have missed a tremendously great gift, a great opportunity. — Rajneesh

The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements. — M T Anderson

Give me the patience for the small things of life, courage for the great trials of life. Help me to do my best each day and then go to sleep knowing God is awake. — Voltaire

The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. — Walter Lippmann

The majority of people are not awake; it is only here and there that we find one even partially awake. Practically all of us, as a result, are living lives that are unworthy almost the name of lives, compared to those we might be living, and that lie within our easy grasp. While it is true that each life is in and of Divine Being, hence always one with it, in order that this great fact bear fruit in individual lives, each one must be conscious of it; he or she must know it in thought, and then live continually in this consciousness. — Ralph Waldo Trine

I color your world."
I blinked and my heart stopped.
How did he ... ?
Oh crap! I told him!
Drunk, in the middle of great sex, I told him!
Ohmigod!
"I was right. You were asleep but you were dreamin'. You dream in black and white, babe. I gave you color. Now, you're awake."
"Tack
"
"You admitted it."
"Tack, please
"
"You were drunk, wet, hot and way the fuck turned on but you still admitted it."
I did and the way he was looking at me, his blue eyes drilling into mine, I couldn't deny it.
And also, it was true.
Damn. — Kristen Ashley

The great march of metal destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is the reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. — G.K. Chesterton

I don't necessarily believe there's a message in the fact that I'm an African-American Republican. I think there is a message that America as a whole, we are now awake. We are looking at a political construct and we're fairly disappointed. I think the message is no matter where you come from in this country, there is great potential. — Tim Scott

Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake:
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near. — William Shakespeare

Her time on Twin Moons was really getting off to a great start. She hadn't even been awake for one whole morning and she'd already given a peep show to strangers and eaten a whole bowl full of horny fruit by mistake. What the hell was she going to do tonight? — Evangeline Anderson

You're lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you've locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you're like that, unguarded, than when you're awake. When you're awake you're like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can't reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. — Nicole Krauss

Oh, Tatiana wouldn't even consider staying here for a moment," Gideon said. "She has fled to the Blackthorns', her in-laws, and good riddance. She is not a stupid girl-in fact, she considers her intelligence to be quite superior-but she is a self-important and vain one, and there is no love lost between her and my brother. And he had been awake for days, mind you. Waiting in that great blasted house, locked out of the library, pounding on the door when no answer came from my father ... "
"You feel protective of him," Sophie observed.
"Of course I do; he is my little brother." He moved forward and brushed a hand over Gabriel's tousled brown hair; the other boy moved and made a restless sound but did not wake. — Cassandra Clare

The misconception about enlightenment stems from, or is at least compounded by, the fact that most of the world's recognized experts on the subject of enlightenment are not enlightened. Some are great mystics, some are great scholars, some are both, and most are neither, but very few are awake. This core misconception will be a big theme in this book because it's the primary obstacle in the quest for enlightenment. Nobody's getting there because nobody knows where there is, and those who are entrusted to point the way are, for a variety of reasons, pointing the wrong way. At the very heart of this confusion lies the belief that abiding non-dual awareness - enlightenment - and the non-abiding experience of cosmic consciousness - mystic union - are synonymous when, in fact, they're completely unrelated. — Jed McKenna

We are always imagining something, It is practically impossible to be awake without imagining something. Then why not imagine something at all times that will inspire the powers within us to do greater and greater things? — Christian D. Larson

A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night. — Marilyn Vos Savant

The rain is, in a sense,
The sole sad friend of those who find themselves
Thinking, wide awake, until the dawn,
Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands,
Listen to it, soothed. They like the company
Of its faint moan across the sleeping plain,
Its rustling in the garden all night long.

- On the Great Grey Road (Sur ce Grand Chemin Gris...) — Alain-Fournier

What is important is not what is said, but that some talk be continually going on. Silence is the great crime, for silence is lonely and frightening. One shouldn't feel much, nor put much meaning into what one says: what you say seems to have more effect if you don't try to understand. One has the strange impression that these people are all afraid of something - what is it? It is as if the "yatata" were a primitive tribal ceremony, a witch dance calculated to appease some god. There is a god, or rather a demon, they are trying to appease: it is the specter of loneliness which hovers outside like the fog drifting in from the sea. One will have to meet this specter's leering terror for the first half-hour one is awake in the morning anyway, so let one do everything possible to keep it away now. — Rollo May

To be on 'Coast to Coast,' you have to be willing to stay awake in the middle of the night. But in return you get a great audience of millions of listeners all across the nation. — George Noory

People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North. — Edward Elgar

O Cyrus , great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself and from my nation. Rest in peace, for we are awake, and we will always stay awake. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

A three-year-old with insomnia is very similar to a heroin addict going through withdrawal. There is nothing that calms them. They can't focus. You can't tell them enough stories. They don't understand why they are still awake four hours past their bedtime. This is commonly understood by all parents of three-year-olds and has inspired great works of literature, such as Go the F-ck to Sleep. — Jim Gaffigan

Carol's liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. — Sinclair Lewis

How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping. — William Lindsay Gresham