Quotes About Reality

This is no jest, but life and death, perhaps more.

The way the ancient perceived the world was the way the world truly was. This gave them extraordinary influence and power. Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue - intellegible and articulate - it was also persuadable.

the more apparatus a magician carries about with him – coloured powders, stuffed cats, magical hats and so forth – the greater the fraud you will eventually discover him to be!" And what, inquired Mr Horrocks politely, were the few tools that a magician did require? "Why! Nothing really," said Mr Norrell. "Nothing but a silver basin for seeing visions in.

And so I have to ask Myself: whose memory is at fault? Mine or his? Might he in fact be remembering conversations that never happened?

Palavra de honra, não existe nada no mundo tão fácil de explicar como o fracasso... É, afinal de contas, o que todo mundo alcança o tempo inteiro.

And she was quite tolerable to look at, you say?" said Mr Lascelles. "You never saw her?" said Drawlight. "Oh! she was a heavenly creature. Quite divine. An angel." "Indeed? And such a pinched-looking ruin of a thing now! I shall advise all the good-looking women of my acquaintance not to die," said Mr Lascelles.

There was no one there. Which is to say there was someone there. Miss Wintertowne lay upon the bed, but it would have puzzled philosophy to say now whether she were someone or no one at all. They

Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.

Strange stepped outside and immediately he almost walked into Captain Hadley-Bright. I was told you were dead! he cried. I was sure you would be, replied Hadley-Bright. There was a pause. Both men felt faintly embarrassed. The ranks of dead and wounded stretched away upon all sides as far as the eye could see. Simply being alive at that moment seemed, in some indefinable way, ungentlemanly.

But nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad. (What do they need so many umbrellas for? Don't they realise that they are imaginary?)

while he was in hospital he became very agitated, saying that he needed to go back to the minotaurs because the minotaurs would have his dinner.

The dialogue that happened between the ancients and the world was not simply something that happened in their heads; it was something that happened in the actual world. The way the Ancients perceived the world was the way the world truly was. This gave them extraordinary influence and power. Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue - intelligible and articulate - it was also persuadable.

They have Matthew Rose Sorensen back – or so they believe. A man with his face and voice and gestures moves about the world, and that is enough for them.

Piranesi. It is what he calls me. Which is strange because as far as I can remember it is not my name.

Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don't want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something?

Sana di mente in un mondo di pazzi.

Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's just you or me, amplified.

Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy.

We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren't news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I'd conjured them into being.

I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.

You can see why doubting one's own craziness is considered a good sign: It's a sort of flailing response by the second interpreter. What's happening? the second interpreter is saying. He tells me it's a tiger but I'm not convinced; maybe there's something wrong with me. Enough doubt is in there to give "reality" a toehold.

A volte, quando avete capito che il vostro treno non si sta veramente muovendo, potete passare un altro mezzo minuto sospesi tra due regni della coscienza: quello che sa che non vi state muovendo e quello che invece ne ha la sensazione. Potete svolazzare avanti e indietro tra queste percezioni e provare una specie di vertigine mentale. E se è così, siete nel territorio della pazzia: un luogo dove le false impressioni hanno tutte le caratteristiche della realtà.