The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for ...transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,... not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hills...ides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begi...n to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the drea...mer, the house allows one to dream in peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Stay--stay with us!--rest--thou art weary and worn!'--... And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;-- But sorrow return'd with the dawning of morn, And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"So I wasn't dreaming, after all," she said to herself, "unless--unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's my d...ream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream," she went on in a rather complaining tone: "I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Child of the pure unclouded brow And dreaming eyes of wonder!... Though time be fleet, and I and thou Are half a life asunder, Thy loving smile will surely hail The love-gift of a fairy-tale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, ...dreaming the same dream in unison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »