Quotes About Nightmares

“Diversion is pernicious to depressives. Our lives are like waking dreams
correction, nightmares
where monsters chase us, never breaking off pursuit in order to rest or to eat or to look for easier prey. Diversion prevents us from confronting those monsters. If we never confront them, we have no hope of ever defeating them. Diversion does NOT work.”

— Northern Adams

“The little girl's face was from Will's vilest nightmares. Cavernous mouth, distended chin, bastardized nose. The enormous, bulging eyes glared at Will, demanded he see the truth, commanded him to acknowledge his sin.”

— Kevin Wallis

“This is the place of nightmares in so many ways, but there's nightmares on the outside, too, and one day, when you're not even looking for it, you'll find something perfect in here, and you'll feel whole. Hold onto that.”

— Ashley Newell

“Emergency Rooms ... were the nightmares your nightmares had while they slept.”

— Nicole Deese

“You're probably wondering why there's never any good news.
I mean, I've been doing this job a few months now. I've been soaking up the paper every week, same as you, and watching the same newsfeeds as you. I got the same list burned into the front of my head as you. Death. Horror. Bad sex. Living nightmares. Each day a little further down the spiral.
There's never any good news because they know you.
I mean, here's the top of today's column that I discarded: I had a really good time last night down the bar with my assistant and some cheerfully doomed sex fiends of our acquaintance.
No one ever sold newspapers by telling you the truth; life just ain't that bad.”

— Warren Ellis

“Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams.”

— Glenda Millard

“Abbey: Did you speak to me in a different language? When I was in the hospital?
Caspian: Something to keep the nightmares at bay. To let you know I was there. Tu sei una stella ... la mia stella. It means 'You're a star. My star.”

— Jessica Verday

“Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.”

— Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski

“I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares.”

— Ilsa J. Bick

“People do not yet realize (because the mind isn't built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out.”

— Martha Gellhorn

“How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares
if there seemed any danger of their coming true!”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

“Plans never go as planned, ever; that's just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn't mean you should let those bad dreams scare you away; all those nightmares want is respect. If you give them that, they'll give you the space you need. Unless, of course, they're the type of nightmares that have an appetite, then you're fucked.”

— Dave Matthes

“Between the world we see
and the things we fear,
there are doors.
When they are opened,
nightmares become reality.”

— A Haunting

“The stuff of nightmares is not only relegated to unconscious thoughts upon a pillow, safely beneath an eiderdown.”

— P.J. Parker

“I don't know what will happen with us," he said softly. "I can't predict the future. If things don't work out between us, yeah, there's a chance you'll hate my guts. To me, losing you as a friend is a pretty big risk. Do you think I'd take that big a risk for a few nights of sex?" He shook his head. "I was having freakin' nightmares about you with those other guys. What you were doing." He buried his face in her hair. "Kerri, I don't want you to see other guys. Just me.”

— Kelly Jamieson

“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.”

— Aleksandar Hemon

“We're not afraid of the dark. Our nightmares were born on sultry, summer afternoons.”

— Laura Wiess

“Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.”

— Ransom Riggs

“I was never really certain why he scared the bejesus out of me. Nothing scared me growing up. I've been playing with dead people since the day I was born, so it's good thing, yet the Big Bad scared me. Which brings me to the reason I called."
"Which was to give me nightmares for the rest of my life?"
"Oh, no, that's just a plus. Why was I so scared of him?"
"Hon, for one thing he was this powerful, massive, black smokelike being."
"So, you're saying I'm a racist?”

— Darynda Jones

“We're connected by millions of shared experiences and dreams and nightmares, all tied together with compassion.”

— Laura Anderson Kurk

“Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.”

— Mike A. Lancaster

“He knew she was his lifemate when she was just a child, and he had given her time. Space. Unconditional love. He never demanded anything of her. He never told her how difficult it was for him- that she was his salvation- just out of his reach. He had always been there for her, in the middle of the night, when her violent past was too close and she couldn't sleep, when nightmares haunted her to the point she couldn't breathe. He was there, in her mind, holding all those terrifying memories at bay. Dimitri. Her Dimitri.”

— Christine Feehan

“Nature provides that a man who slaves all day should spend the hours of the night in a palace full of houris whereas a king who wields the sceptre by day should have his sleep disturbed by nightmares of rebellion and assassination.”

— Khushwant Singh

“All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.”

— Greg Bear

“I'm ready to be on my own, away from the nightmares that haunt my room, my life, my whole world.”

— Jessica Sorensen

“Even the most horribl e of nightmares is laced with the promise of dawn.”

— Richard Paul Evans

“Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Since Americans are by nature individualistic and entrepreneurial, by definition, then, the socialist program is anti-American, to say nothing of totalitarian. Socialism is an old dream. Some dreams are nightmares when put into practice.”

— Ben Carson

“What I don't think this man realizes is that he's giving my dreams
and my nightmares
a new name.
Brand. Alec Brand.”

— M. Leighton

“I think my character's getting to the point where he can't even eat spaghetti with red sauce anymore, where he has horrible nightmares, he can't sleep anymore.”

— George Eads

“In that far away land, night never came and day never broke. It was the place where tears did not fall and worries did not exist ... until the nightmares began.”

— Nely Cab

“My dreams are of water. And my nightmares.”

— Siouxsie Sioux

“Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities.”

— Anaïs Nin

“I really hate to get old. I don't talk about it much. And sometimes at night I wake up and I have nightmares that I know how old I am.”

— Sirio Maccioni

“Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.”

— Herbert Gold

“I've read and traveled a lot in the Middle East, and I built on eyewitness accounts of horrific executions that would shape a boy's character and beliefs if he watched his father die that way. These are the stuff of which nightmares are made.”

— Terry Hayes

“Between the journeymen, vampires crouched like monstrous gargoyles: hairless, corded with a tight network of steel-hard muscle, and smeared in lime-green and purple sunblock. Bubble-gum-tinted nightmares.”

— Ilona Andrews

“But when I was doing the KKK I had constant nightmares of being exposed as a Jew and lynched by the Klan.”

— Jon Ronson

“Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.”

— Jon Ronson

“She wishes nightmares were all that kept her awake. She cannot tell which disturbs here more, the future or the past.”

— Alice Hoffman

“An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.”

— Jules Florencio Cortazar

“Everything I was afraid of when I was growing up, I've become. I've taken on my nightmares, like the devil and the end of the world, and I've become those things.”

— Marilyn Manson

“The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.”

— Chloe Thurlow

“But isn't that what love is, Clarissa? Ownership? 'I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine,' as the Song of Songs goes."
"No. And don't quote the Bible at me. I don't think you get it ... It's not just that someone belongs to you, it's that you give yourself to them. I doubt you've ever given anything to anyone. Except maybe nightmares."
"To give yourself to someone?" The thin smile didn't waver. "As you've given yourself to Jonathan?"
"What?"
"You think I haven't seen the way you two look at each other? The way he says your name? You may not think I can feel, but that doesn't mean I can't see feelings in others.”

— Cassandra Clare

“How do you bear it?" Finnick looks at me in disbelief. "I don't, Katniss! Obviously, I don't. I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking." "The more you can distract yourself the better, " he says. "First thing tomorrow, we'll get you your own rope. Until then take mine.”

— Suzanne Collins

“My dates are nightmares! If she were awake, alive, not on parole and truly single that would start. Place, time and what we do matters little if I'm out with the right woman.”

— Vantile Whitfield

“There was a clown that tried to eat me as a boy, in my nightmares. Years later I found a clown for booking online who resembled him named Patches. Needless to say, Patches is dead now.”

— Thom Yorke

“Love is the greatest of dreams, yet the worst of nightmares.”

— William Shakespeare

“A friend told me 'I guess you gotta go through a lot of nightmares, before you finally, you know, accomplish your dreams.”

— LeBron James