“And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,How if our waking life, like that of sleep,Be all a dream in that eternal lifeTo which we wake not till we sleep in death”

“Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.”

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state? ”

“I feel like Sleeping Beauty, forever asleep, with the waking world continuing on without me fully aware. Only there is no prince to wake me from this slumber, this half-life.”

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”

“We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.”