Quotes About Reality

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren't true often turn out not to be false.

the things you thought weren't true often turn out not to be false.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

O world, Your love, your chances, are beyond the stretch Of any hand from here! And so, unreal, A touching dream to which we all are lulled But wake from separately.

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

between the constitutional formality and the political reality. For example, ministers are responsible formally to the monarch. Because of the political changes wrought in the nineteenth century, they are by convention responsible now also to Parliament. By convention, the government

It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city's elegant lines, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger; a stormfront of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling towards the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship. It didn't look like home.

You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The closest we can come to the truth about reality is in the fictions that we create about it.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

It is just as if some phenzy-struck person supposed himself to be grappling with an imaginary combatant, and then, having with great efforts thrown himself down, thought that it was his foe who was lying there;

The facts must rule philosophy, not philosophy the facts.

And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast

The explanatory urge is mostly a good thing. Indeed, it is the propulsive force behind all human efforts to comprehend reality. The problem is that we move too fast from confusion and uncertainty ("I have no idea why my hand is pointed at a picture of a shovel") to a clear and confident conclusion ("Oh, that's simple") without spending any time in between ("This is one possible explanation but there are others").

Uncertainty is real," Byers writes. "It is the dream of total certainty

We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.