Quotes About Reality

it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.

Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for his own.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I

the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things.

He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

His illusions about American decency had not survived the reading of American history.

I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

The great truth was that we were not the center of things, or others' lives, but only so in our own mind's eye. We were all obscure nobodies at our essence.

No matter how much they tried to dress her up with neon and family entertainment she [Las Vegas] was still a whore.

I felt sympathy for her but not too much. Idealism dies hard with everybody.

There were elegantly made up women sitting on bus benches who were not really women and not really waiting for buses.

The citizens want their police to protect them, to keep the plague from their eyes, from their doors. But those same John Q.'s are the first to stare wide-eyed and point the finger of outrage when they see close up exactly what the job they've given the cops entails.

It's all a cesspool, man. Doesn't matter if you're on the bottom or the top. You're still swimming in shit.

The excitement and adrenaline that accompany a new case caused a false high that always wore off quickly.

It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

It was life exaggerated

Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Idealism dies hard with everybody.

I reminded myself of a simple truism—everybody lies