#cons

Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them. ↗

— Jeff Lindsay

#conscience #dreams

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#authoritarianism #bill-of-rights #constitution #democracy #egalitarianism

The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain. ↗

— Lisa St Aubin de Terán

#content #creativity #form #imagination #structure

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#dreams

...a dream isn't a wish - it's an altered state of consciousness ... ↗

— John Geddes

#state-of-consciousnesssness #wishes #dreams

Sometimes, we feel conscious but unable to move our body. The first thing to do is focus in a prayer, then start to wink frequently. By this way, slowly but sure our body can be moved totally by our persistent willpower. ↗

— Toba Beta

#conscious #control #dream #dreams #focus

What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest. (p. 109) ↗

— André Aciman

#dreams #love-and-loss #unrequited-love #dreams

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams. ↗

— Karen Blixen

#dreams #fear #freedom #nightmares #dreams

... dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#higher-consciousness #science-of-mind #truth #dreams

Needing to express what it’s like here.... / Trying to digest the incoming stream .... / And dream it all over again. ↗

— Jay Woodman

#dream #express #stream #dreams