Distant Dreams

Famous quotes containing the words distant and/or dreams:

    The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
    The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
    The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
    And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
    Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
    And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
    Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
    And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
    Thomas Gray (1716–1771)

    Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.
    Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)