Wake

Famous quotes containing the word wake:

““Have we any control over being born?,” my friend asked in despair. “No, the job is done for us while we’re sleeping, so to speak, and when we wake up everything is all set. We merely appear, like an ornate celebrity wheeled out in a wheelchair.” “I don’t remember,” my friend claimed. “No need to,” I said: “what need have us free-loaders for any special alertness? We’re done for.””
—Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist. The Self-Devoted Friend, New Directions (1967)

“We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.”
—Walter De La Mare (1873–1956)

“Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)