The Dreamers Quotes

“This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“But time moves in only one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fail.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“When one's life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea. No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation - that's what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn't every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that? But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight. And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming: His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Not everything that happens in a life can be digested. Some events stay forever whole. Some images never leave the mind.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“To close one's eyes can be an act of survival.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The unproven, he says, should not be confused with the impossible.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“How expert we are at looking away from what we would rather not see.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else's dream.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.

Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.

Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep?

Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint?

Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.

Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Every one of her days hums with the possibility that she might be doing it wrong.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“His mind is like that: always mired in a terrible future.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“She has the feeling already that she will remember this night for a long time. But she feels this way often, a certain simmering. It is a habit of thinking she shares with her father--every ordinary moment holds a potential calamity, and you cannot know when one will rise.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could also accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“But a heaviness lingers in his limbs, awareness - no diagnostic test can register whether it’s a symptom of the sickness or grief. The darkest moods sometimes descend after periods of unexpected light.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“To say they are ignoring what is happening at the college would not quite be true, or not quite fair. A few sick strangers--those poor kids, but none from the classes they teach--is only one of a hundred bad stories that must be overlooked every day. To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Sara is still a little in her dream--something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She is wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Here is what he has learned about loving a baby: the time away from her is vital to the pleasure of being with her.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers