Daydream Quotes

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.”
― Grace Willows, To Kiss a King

“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

“She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.”
― Grace Willows

“Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“You can run from the truth. You can run and hide from the truth.
You can deny and avoid the truth. But you cannot destroy the truth. Nor can you make the lie true. You must know that love will always uncover the truth.”
― Delano Johnson, Love Quotes

“What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.”
― David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories

“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.”
― W.H. Auden

“Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent.

The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance.

But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment . . .

What a soft thoughtful time.

In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“We daydream to heal, to hope, to be happier. It is mental and emotional therapy. Daydreams are experiences both imagined and felt, which makes them very real to the mind and the heart. So relax. Smile. Daydream.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year

“It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.

Yes, that had been the dream.”
― John Marsden, The Dead of Night

“I can't say what I was looking for exactly, though I was ever hopeful that he might come out and profess his love, save me, run away with me, solve all my problems.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“A dream is a short trip into the mind’s museum.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“You fell because you were looking to fall,
You fell because you’re kind.
Your humans called you Daydreamer girl,
but you fell because you were mine.”
― F.K. Preston

“My particular brand of anxiety often sought to corrupt the innocence of the everyday into the delinquency of my daydreams.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“My daydreams never let me down (217).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“And we’d all live happily ever after...

"Okay, that was a nice daydream, but maybe it’s time to come back to reality.”
― Sarah K.L. Wilson, The Ruby Isles

“There is no better place to indulge in endless daydreams than sitting by a campfire!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“You can make anything happen, anything at all, inside a daydream.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Not a hundred feet away the river roared over a cliff's-edge, and were weren't really leaves, even if I'd been careful to forget that.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“Not a hundred feet away the river roared over a cliff's-edge, and we weren't really leaves, even if I'd been careful to forget that.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“In daydreaming, you don't have to create plans or know how to get where you're going. Your mind will see this as reality and new responses will follow.
So daydream. Daydream with your heart, soul, emotions, imagination, and courage.”
― Jeanne McElvaney, Ignite Changes Using Energy: A Guide for Letting Go of Old Thinking

“(Kiss) It's not a sin; It’s nature’s ceremony of love’s expression.”
― Jazalyn, Loving with the Senses

“Jeremy Jeppers hated doing everything. That is, almost everything. He loved to dream about great adventures fighting house-sized dragons, navigating the darkest forests, and flying into thunderstorms with his jet. No matter how harrowing the challenge, Jeremy was always the hero.”
― Anthony Trendl, The Boy Who Hated Doing Everything

“A Churchyard In Summertime by Stewart Stafford

O, to stand in a quiet country churchyard,
The graveyard bending in summer zephyrs,
Chlorophyll light beneath swaying poplars,
Rook song in twilight's nocturne.

Oblivious hues spread upon canvas,
Beside the somnambulant swanning river,
Miasmas of midges at the water's edge,
In the crosshairs of a painter's thumb.

Then the sun rolls away over the horizon,
A veil draws across the long day's play,
A churn supper collection of basket and easel,
Recollections in the slumbering night.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Then she returned to her little bedroom, which had been the site of so many wild imaginings of all the places she would go, and all the people she would meet, and what the whole incredible arc of her life would look like once her biographer finally sat down to try and do it justice.”
― Anna Godbersen, Splendor

“If he didn’t change, the world around him wouldn’t change either. Nothing would happen. His future was in his own hands, and he had the feeling that right now this was something more than a daydream.”
― Rieko Yoshihara, Ai no Kusabi Vol. 2: Destiny

“Protect the seedling of
hope! Hold it while they whip you like they whipped me. Your tears will water it. It will take root in your stomach; it will not abandon
you. Your belly will seem a little warmer, the lashings of today a little
tamer, and the dawn not so far away.”
― Vladimir Hlocky, Journeys Beyond Earth

“I am at the concert and I am smirking in the corner, ignoring what my peers are discussing. Let us picture something good. I'm wearing a level-two bulletproof vest under my Ralph Lauren vintage flannel, and already it's almost entirely concealed. Makes me look slightly more built, nobody's complaining. It also protects against nine millimeter and forty caliber rounds, the only kinds police use anymore. I think. Over that, a Swiss military jacket littered with pockets, all of which I custom fit to hold the six magazines accompanying my short barrel rifle. It's a gun small enough to fit perfectly along my back while still under my coat. In the pockets of my Levi five-elevens - a switchblade and one smoke grenade, reserved for either my entrance or exit. I still haven't decided. In my waistband is a...
... and then two squad cars skid to a halt outside. I see them before they see me, as the front windows are tinted in my favor. With a fresh magazine, I am and shoot at - "HEY!"
Someone shouting playfully in my face has yanked me back into the concert hall”
― Mike Ma, Harassment Architecture