Quotes About Reality

Sure, I suffered a lot. But it's not like the end of the world and it's not who I am. I lead quite a pleasant life and I'm able to divorce a perceived reality from my actual experience of life.

New York will always seem more real than anything Britain has to offer. It is strange that, although the majority of British people have never seen a skate-boarding body-popper, an exploding fire-hydrant, or anybody dunk a doughnut, these things seem infinitely more immediate and happening images than that jar of Horlicks which has stood in the cupboard for 40 years

It seemed he was the perfect lover, at least for the moment. He did not live where you lived. He did not see you often enough, or for long enough, for you to grow bored, or to feel afraid that you were not feeling love---or worse, that you were. The perfection had a cost, which is that he was not in any true sense a real person. He was a coat you bought off the rack, an unsuperlative fashion statement.

I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.

But there are no grown-ups, that's what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.

As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.

What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

The lie described my life better than the truth,' I added. 'Until it became a kind of truth.

It's like there is a video game inside his head except what happens there will happen here.

The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.

This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Actually the only one of us who has been to Paraguay in the last thirty years is the Ambassador," said the receptionist, "and he's in Wales at the moment.

Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it.

Spies tend to make extravagant claims for their craft, but the reality of espionage is that it frequently makes little lasting difference.

reality he worked for MI6, recruiting agents and potential double agents and, with his wife, Peggie, also an MI6 officer, organizing a rich range of skulduggery to confound German espionage in the Iberian peninsula.

In the film, Montagu makes a cameo appearance as an air vice marshal with doubts about the plan's feasibility. At one point in the film, Montagu leans over to Webb, looks him in the eye, and declares: "I suppose you realise, Montagu, that, if the Germans see through this, it will pinpoint Sicily." This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.

Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

why do you think poseurs pose? Because they want to be invited to the dominion of the real, an almost magical zone of unselfed sensation, and they know their very desire for it disqualifies them. Consider that, the next time you cluck your tongue at some awful, grandiose fake. Dude just wants to feel.

Everyone always says, 'Don't you want to see the baby, don't you want to see the baby,' but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I'd have only to look in the mirror.

Everyone had a story he believed was worthy of a best-seller; for me, reality was rarely interesting enough to take the place of fiction.

He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.