Quotes About Reality

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn't go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn't ever do it twice.

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

If it doesn't happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn't there to begin with.

What's amazing is that they make a market in this fantasy stuff," said Druskin. "It's not a real asset.

The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody's mind.

I'm doing something I always dreamed about doing, and it was about the most depressing moment I've ever had in my life

It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded - without being insane.

There's a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts Fire! in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over

Other, more technically adroit people would soon generate closer approximations of reality. What mattered was (a) it was a rational, testable hypothesis; and (b) James made it so clear and interesting that it provoked a lot of intelligent people to join the conversation. "The

Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them—to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch. Each of these people told you something about the state of the financial system, in the same way that people who survive a plane crash told you something about the accident, and also about the nature of people who survive accidents.

Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn't following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real.

He'd now awakened to the possibility that at least one of his mental models badly distorted reality: his model of American government.

The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore: How does the brain create meaning? How does it turn the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality?

The triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run.

I think it's going to set the world on fire," said Gates. "It didn't do anything. There are fifteen comments at the bottom of the piece on the Web, and all of them are Russian mail order brides.

The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make

If that involved some misperception on Amos's part—some exaggeration of the earthly status of Danny's ideas—well, then, Amos should continue to misperceive. After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else? "I wanted something from him, not from the world," said Danny.

Ronan, for his part, couldn't quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. "It's a whole industry of bullshit," he said.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage.

If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more complicated one?

His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.