“What if all things in our imagination exist somewhere?" he said. "What if dreams are real?""It would be nice to have black wings," Emily admitted."But it would be our fears, too. Our worst nightmares. Perhaps the dark things are balanced by the sexual imagination, the nightmares tempered. The place of dreams, of suppressed consciousness, ceases to be merely the repository of the bad things we can't face, as we build, instead, a paradise, because we fuck.""There are Buddhist sects that say so. There are temples in Asia with very shocking carvings.”

“That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.”

“It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.”

“So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.”

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”

“Dreams spark the imagination like nothing else. We have perhaps our most creative thoughts in dreams.”