Quotes About Reality

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things—a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf—are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus.

We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care all about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right reasons? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet- for me anyway- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe

What you don't understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don't believe. Hard lines.

Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?

as far as I can see, everyone is mad. Do you know Matty, that's the only explanation for the world that I can see -- everyone's as mad as hatters... Mad. All of us. Everyone.

Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.

Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

That's the point—anything might be true anywhere, there's never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything's so crazy, anything at all's possible.

Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.

Las palabras aparecen en tu mente y allí bailan a ritmos de los que tú conscientemente nada sabes. Cabos y rabos de palabras: pueden ser una indicación de un estado de ánimo oculto. Pueden removerse o cantar durante días, enloqueciéndote. Pueden ser como película invisible, como pelicula adhesiva, entre tú y la realidad.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else's reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence.

Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we're addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide. It is, in reality, people who slide.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing

She was an actress in the theater of true life

I have been taught to face reality: an excellent thing.

In order to rule, one must face reality.