Permissiveness, immorality, pornography, drugs, the power of peer pressure-all these and more-cause many to be tossed about on a sea of sin and crushed on the jagged reefs of lost opportunities, forfeited blessings, and shattered dreams.
The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return. We know that, and we are used to it. Those who don't return become a part of the clouds, a part of the animals that hide in the ravines and of the water that comes from the earth. They become part of everything. They become the Soul of the World.
When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted.
Often, during combat, the warrior of light receives blows that he was not expecting. And he realizes that, during a war, his enemy is bound to win some of the battles. When this happens, the warrior of light weeps bitter tears and rests in order to recover his energies a little. But he immediately resumes the battle for his dreams.
They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.
I am really, truly a hopeless romantic, myself, and I am also obsessed with past lives, knowing someone from a past life and knowing that right away, when you meet them. I really believe in inexplicable connections with people, and the way your subconscious enters your dreams. Those are themes in life that I'm really fascinated in.
I don't really know what the dream role would be. That's a hard question to answer. You never really know, until you're immersed into something, how passionate you feel for it and how it unravels.
So dear to heav'n is saintly chastity, That when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried angels lackey her, Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in clear dream and solemn vision Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear, Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape.
Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it's like a dream.
...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.
I'd like to be a geneticist to be honest, but there are limits to what I can do now. For my dream to come true I'd have to be 20 years old again, heading off to a blue chip university.