Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

There's a look people get in their eyes when you're talking to them and they're not seeing you, and you know it's because they have a movie running through their head.

I feel I was always daydreaming, and I was always distracted.

I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

I am a beau in nothing but my books.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

I go to sleep at night, and I feel like I just dreamed the whole day.

I'm terrifically absentminded.

I don't see myself in an ivory tower.

I get in that zone, even if I'm relaxing or whatever, where I just zone out. I don't even hear anybody. You could ask me a question five times, and I don't even hear it.

I know I may appear spacey, but that's how I am.

Strange is this alien despotism of Sleep which takes two persons lying in each other's arms & separates them leagues, continents,asunder.

Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.

The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practised on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practised dreamer slips into like a bone slips into its sockets

In another place, in another time, she would have felt the majesty of the beauty around her, but as she stood on the beach, she realized that she didn't feel anything at all. In a way, she felt as if she weren't really here, as if the whole thing was nothing but a dream.

Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water." - Whelk

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.