Quotes About Reality

You said yourself, John, this park is entertainment," Wu said. "And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.

Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience.

the truest picture of life in the past incorporated the interplay of all aspects of life, the good and the bad, the strong and the weak. It was no good pretending anything else.

your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions. The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

Religion explains what man cannot explain. But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see it at all . . . No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.

The episode related here is based on a true story.

But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.

The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves.

Used to be - in the old days - the media image roughly corresponded to reality. But now it's all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement. So now day-to-day life is false, and the media image is true. Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.

That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.

Y entretanto, ¿te das cuenta de cómo se mueve el bote? Eso es el mar. Es real. ¿Hueles el salitre en el aire? ¿Notas el sol en la piel? Eso es real. ¿Nos ves a todos aquí juntos? Eso es real. La vida es maravillosa. Estar vivo, respirar y ver el sol es un don. Y de hecho no hay nada más que eso.

But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things.

We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas. Those environments are changing.

for thirty years this country's had the best aviation safety record in the world. But the thing is, we paid for it. We paid to have new, safe planes and we paid for the oversight to make sure they were well maintained. But those days are over. Now, everybody believes in something for nothing.

We looked at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. Of course we knew it was changing but we behaved as if it wasn't. We denied the reality of change. So change always surprised us.

There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.

The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.

The problem with the truth is, it's so often mild and clichéd.

I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.

End of story. 'Happily ever after' fell on everyone like a guillotine's blade.

Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.

Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.

There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and worship, that rake the graveled paths and erect the occasional rock garden, the bronze boy-man, the hammered cup for snow to fall into.

I think pretty much everybody who says he needs money really and truly needs money.