Waking Quotes

“i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone”
― James Dashner, The Scorch Trials

“The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
― Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems

“The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.”
― Roman Payne

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.”
― Shannon Celebi, After Spring Comes

“I was happy in the dream; but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn't want to start. My skin was crawling, and I couldn't manage a single clear thought. It was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape. I didn't get much done that day.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit

“Be gentle,
always delicate
with every soul
you meet,
for every single morning
you wake up,
there is someone
Wishing,
silently
and secretly,
that they
had not.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

“She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
― Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse

“The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unwakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

“...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“We still & always want waking.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“So start with the waking state. When you are hungry eat, but always remember that it is the body that is hungry, not you. If you hurt your leg, wash and clean the wound, apply medication, but always remember that it is the body that is hurt, not you. This much remembrance – and you will find that ninety-nine percent of the pain has vanished. This slight knowledge, this little awareness removes so much of your suffering. One percent is bound to remain because the knowledge is not total. When knowledge becomes total all of the suffering disappears.
Buddha said that an awakened person is beyond suffering. You can cut off the limbs of such a person, you can throw him in the fire, you can kill him, but you cannot make him suffer, because he stands apart from all that is happening around him.”
― Osho, Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery

“I lost my circadian rhythm during extreme night shift work and I restored it by using continuous light therapy. I was waking up at sunrise with the birds, no alarm clock needed.”
― Steven Magee

“Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“You will not think clearly about your life until you think mythically. Until you see with the eyes of your heart.”
― John Eldredge, Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive

“A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it so little, that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last, he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him.”
― George MacDonald, The Portent

“If sleep is truce, as it is sometimes said,
a pure time for the mind to rest and heal,
why, when they suddenly wake you, do you feel
that they have stolen everything you had?”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“My soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“...my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“If you are not naturally waking up at sunrise, then it is likely you have some form of Circadian Rhythm Disorder.”
― Steven Magee

“I lost my circadian rhythm during extreme night shift work atop the very high altitude mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Waking up in the morning, staying awake during the daytime and sleeping has been problematic ever since.”
― Steven Magee

“Continuous daytime full spectrum light therapy restored my circadian rhythm and I was waking up at sunrise with the birds.”
― Steven Magee

“To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them....”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I call daytime fatigue that occurs after waking up and turning off a CPAP machine: CPAP Conclusion Induced Fatigue.”
― Steven Magee

“I opened my eyes: soft light, morning, cool. The shimmer of a dream as it departed. I have always enjoyed waking up to different weather, as if the world's been up to something in the night.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?