Dream
Quotes -
“For
Jenn
At
12 years old I started bleeding with the moon
and
beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.
I
fought with my knuckles white as stars,
and
left bruises the shape of Salem.
There
are things we know by heart,
and
things we don't.
At
13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.
I'd
watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos,
but
I could never make dying beautiful.
The
sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myself
veins
are kite strings you can only cut free.
I
suppose I love this life,
in
spite of my clenched fist.
I
open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,
and
there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,
and
I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the
first time his fingers touched the keys
the
same way a soldier holds his breath
the
first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We
all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.
But
my lungs remember
the
day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly
and
told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat.
And
I knew life would tremble
like
the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek,
like
a prayer on a dying man's lips,
like
a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…
just
take me just take me
Sometimes
the scales themselves weigh far too much,
the
heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.
We
were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,
but
you still have to call it a birthday.
You
still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess
and
hope she knows you can hit a baseball
further
than any boy in the whole third grade
and
I've been running for home
through
the windpipe of a man who sings
while
his hands playing washboard with a spoon
on a
street corner in New Orleans
where
every boarded up window is still painted with the words
We're
Coming Back
like
a promise to the ocean
that
we will always keep moving towards the music,
the
way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.
Beauty,
catch me on your tongue.
Thunder,
clap us open.
The
pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.
Tonight
lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,
then
wake us washing the feet of pregnant women
who
climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.
I
know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun.
I
know the heartbeat of his mother.
Don't
cover your ears, Love.
Don't
cover your ears, Life.
There
is a boy writing poems in Central Park
and
as he writes he moves
and
his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart,
and
there are men playing chess in the December cold
who
can't tell if the breath rising from the board
is
their opponents or their own,
and
there's a woman on the stairwell of the subway
swearing
she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,
and
I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun
with
strip malls and traffic and vendors
and
one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it.
Ya'll,
I know this world is far from perfect.
I am
not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I
know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But
every ocean has a shoreline
and
every shoreline has a tide
that
is constantly returning
to
wake the songbirds in our hands,
to
wake the music in our bones,
to
place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave river
that
has to run through the center of our hearts
to
find its way home.”
―
Andrea Gibson
“Don't
be trapped in someone else's dream.”
―
Taehyung
“The
ox feels the yoke, but does the bird feel the weight of its wings?”
―
Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm
“They'll
say you are bad
or
perhaps you are mad
or
at least you
should
stay undercover.
Your
mind must be bare
if
you would dare
to
think you can love
more
than one lover.”
―
David Rovics
“Please
— consider me a dream.”
―
Franz Kafka
“It
seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no
relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of
absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that
notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of
dreams...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of
any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its
meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we
dream-alone...”
―
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“In
my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or
ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I
could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you
fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will
fall forever.”
―
Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
“My
mother—with all the embarrassment and hurt that she caused me in my youth—ended
up giving me the drive and the fire I needed to be more and to do more.”
―
Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and
Beyond
“Never
say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that
something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be;
human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our
own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become
self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.
Master
yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement,
exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your
dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it's conqueror.”
―
Mike Norton
“I
should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer,
the house allows one to dream in peace.”
―
Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space
“Dreaming
is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into
practice.”
―
Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
“What
the war did to dreamers.”
―
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
“I
was the walrus, but now I am John...and so my friends, you'll just have to
carry on. The dream is over.”
―
John Lennon
“You're
a dream. Like everything else.”
―
Kelly Creagh, Nevermore
“The
last time she was up here, she had been... staring up at the sky and dreaming
of stars. Now, she looked down and plotted flames.”
―
Kiersten White, And I Darken
“There's
only one place I want to go and it's to all the places I've never been.”
―
Nikki rowe
“I
sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments
I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life;
because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion,
all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed
myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of
sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering
around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that
they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their
lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in
the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever
the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is
timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”
―
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
