A Quote by Karen Russell

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.
Not all lucid dreams are useful but they all have a sense of wonder about them. If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?
I would have liked to catch hold of sleep at least once, just as I had been resolved to catch hold of death one day, to catch hold of the wings of the angel of sleep when it came for me, to grab it with two fingers like a butterfly after sneaking up on it from behind. [...] My sleep game was practice for the grand struggle with death.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
I have very vivid dreams - almost always action-adventure. I'm often on the run. I've always had dreams. When I was little, I'd go to sleep with my head on my hands, which were in fists like I was looking through a camera. I felt like sleep was the movies - just drifting off to the movies.
If you wonder how you'll get through this new heartbreak, just think back. Remember all you've been through in the past. And how each time you swore, you'd never get through it. But you did. And look where you're at now. This too shall pass!
I never sleep alone. If there is no one to sleep next to, I'll sleep next to a stuffed animal. It makes me feel secure and safe. It's a little embarrassing to admit it; I'm an old man now. It's important to me though.
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain... It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see... That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed.
She could've looked at the tiny miracles in front of her: my feet, my hands, my fingers, the shape of my shoulders beneath my jacket, my human body, but she only stared at my eyes. The wind whipped again, through the trees, but it had no force, no power over me. The cold bit at my fingers, but they stayed fingers. "Grace," I said, very softly. "Say something." "Sam," she said, and I crushed her to me.
I suppose when the things that give you bad dreams live inside you, there's no point in trying to stop them. They're going to come out whenever they decide it is their time. Better just to close your eyes and hold on tight, the faster to get the things you fear to go back to sleep themselves.
Have we so soon forgotten those four years of terrible carnage, the greatest war of all time; forgotten the millions of men who gave their lives, who made the supreme sacrifice and who today, beneath the soil of France and Belgium, sleep the eternal sleep?
Like all planets, I turn in my sleep, I’ve been doing it since before I was born. My body is a nightmare it hurts me every day. I’ve been taught to resent it by boys trying to forge themselves righteous through conquering. They knew there was something wrong with me, it was explained through hands that spoke only in exclamation points.
If you must sleep through a third of your life, why should you sleep through your dreams, too?.
Human beings generally need between six and eight hours of restful sleep each night. Restful sleep means that you're not using pharmaceuticals or alcohol to get to sleep, but that you're drifting off easily once you turn off the light and are sleeping soundly through the night.
One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
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