Quotes About Reality

If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.

Turning all this over in my mind, I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whiskey, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be very useful in the real world, that's for sure.

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take." (p. 318).

Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it. -from Hear the Wind Sing

Just as I have my own role to play, so does time. And time does its job much more faithfully, much more accurately, than I ever do. Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it's been moving ever forward without a moment's rest. And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old. The honour of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

Passion can't sustain itself forever.

Nobody would take the time and effort to hang a fake moon in a real sky.

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?" This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War. I love that line. That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

Cerrar los ojos no va a cambiar nada. Nada va a desaparecer simplemente por no ver lo que está pasando. De hecho, las cosas serán aún peor la próxima vez que los abras. Sólo un cobarde cierra los ojos. Cerrar los ojos y taparse los oidos no va a hacer que el tiempo se detenga.

The world is a metaphor, Kafka Tamura.

That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth.

Its Barnum & Bailey world just as phony as it can be, But it would't be make-believe if you believed in me

If you don't believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.

The real world—where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.

It's not so easy for people to end their own lives. It's not like in the movies. There, they do it like nothing, no pain, and it's all over, they're dead. The reality is not like that. You lie in bed for ten years with the piss oozing out of you.

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle, a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

But utopias don't exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion.