How many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found...they too are the victims of the reality they created.
Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: As star at dawn, a bubble in a stream A flash of lightning in a summer cloud A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.
I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.
Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again, To scenes by memory's silver chain Close-linked, and ever yet apart, That like the vine, whose tendrils young Around some fostering branch have clung, Grown with its growth, as tho' it sprung From one united heart.
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.