'The great fragmentation of maturity.'

One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one’s being. Henceforward everything moves on shifting levels—our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforth we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridescent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose into one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.

—Henry Miller, "The Fourteenth Ward," Black Spring (1963)

'reality is lost to him forever'

It happens that a man sometimes sees such a thing in a dream, and afterwards he dwells on this dream all his life, reality is lost to him forever, and he is decidedly good for nothing anymore. Her name was Ulinka.

—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls (1842, trans. 1996 Pevear and Volokhonsky)

"invention, by its nature, can't be a lie"

"Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine."

—Eugène Ionesco, Paris Review interview, The Art of Theater No. 6 (1984)

'successful and decided action'

Dreams! Always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate the soul, all the more impossible the dreams. Every man possesses his own dose of natural opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and from birth to death how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, be part of, that picture my imagination has painted, and that resembles you?

—Charles Baudelaire, "L'Invitation Au Voyage," Paris Spleen (1869) (trans. Louise Varèse 1947)

'the awful torrent of things and people'

Ah, it's an awful thing . . . and being young doesn't help any . . . when you notice for the first time . . . the way you lose people as you go along . . . buddies you'll never see again . . . never again . . . when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams . . . that it's all over . . . finished . . . that you too will get lost someday . . . a long way off but inevitably . . . in the awful torrent of things and people . . . of the days and shapes . . . that pass . . . that never stop . . . All these assholes, these pests . . . all these bystanders and extras strolling under the arcades, with their pince-nez, their umbrellas, and their little mutts on the leash . . . you'll never see them again . . . Already they're passing . . . they're in a dream with the others . . . they're in cahoots . . . soon they'll be gone . . . It's really sad . . . it's rotten . . . all these harmless people parading along the shop fronts . . . A wild desire took hold of me . . . I was trembling with panic . . . I wanted to jump out on them . . . to plant myself in front of them . . . and make them stop where they were . . . Grab them by their coats . . . a dumb idea . . . and make them stop . . . and not move anymore . . . stay where they were, once and for all . . . and not see them going away anymore.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)

'something commensurate to his capacity for wonder'

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

'a high price for living too long with a single dream'

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . .

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

dreamers, utopians and holy fools

But the merit and the whole significance of such people as Dostoevsky reside precisely in that they do not bow down before the force of fact and they do not serve that force. Set against this crude force of 'that which exists', they possess the spiritual force of faith in truth and goodness - in 'that which ought to exist'. Not to be led astray by the apparent domination of evil, and not to renounce the inapparent good on account of it, is a feat of faith. Man's entire strength resides in this. Whoever is incapable of this feat will achieve nothing and will have no word to address to humanity. Those people who acknowledge fact [alone] live by the grace of others, but it is not they who create life. It is the people of faith who create life. These are the people known as dreamers, utopians and holy fools - these are the prophets, truly the best people and the leaders of humanity. Today we commemorate such a person.

—Vladimir Soloviev, Three Speeches in Memory of F. M. Dostoevsky (1882)

'Sweet dreams burn me'

"The thief who hung on the cross managed to recover the joy of life and a bold, realizable hope, though he probably had no more than an hour left to live. You still have long years ahead of you, and most likely I will not die as soon as it seems. What if, by a miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a terrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong, proud of our truth? ... Sweet dreams burn me, and I can hardly breathe from excitement. I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault. Let us live! The sun does not rise twice a day, and life is not given us twice—hold fast to the remains of your life and save them ..."

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Story of an Unknown Man" (1892) (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 2004)

'The sleeper's visions are as turbulent as his day.'

[I]t was a very frequent theme of moralists that virtue is marked by the disappearance of dreams that translate the appetites and involuntary movements of the mind and body. "The sleeper's visions," said Seneca, "are as turbulent as his day." Plutarch cited Zeno in affirming that it is a sign of progress when a person no longer dreams that he derives pleasure from indecent actions. And he alluded to those individuals who have enough strength in their waking hours to combat and resist their passions, but who at night, "throwing off opinions and laws," cease to feel any shame: then there awakens what is immoral and licentious within them.

—Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (The History of Sexuality, Volume 3) (1984) (trans. R.H. 1986)