Quotes About Reality

feel as if I'm visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united. Tealing

How odd it felt to share a kitchen most mornings with a man whose face she had seen in the news, without caring, for years. She was no longer intimidated, but sometimes she saw him across the room and thought that he must be a hologram, a figment.

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.

It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.

How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!

Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time.

Life always refused simplicity.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it. [p. 69]

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

Books are not life, however much we may wish they were

Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, "People tell me it's a cliché. But it doesn't feel like a cliché to me." Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein.

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

Quantas vezes contamos a história da nossa vida? Quantas vezes adaptamos, embelezamos, fazemos cortes matreiros? E, quanto mais a vida avança, menos são os que à nossa volta desafiam o nosso relato, para nos lembrar que a nossa vida não é a nossa vida, é só a história que contámos sobre a nossa vida. Que contámos aos outros mas — principalmente — a nós próprios.

Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.