Quotes About Reality

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.

Houses are entirely different when you know them well, she thought, and on first acquaintance even more different from their real selves, more deceptive about their real character than human beings.

We had never learnt to dance, and, for some reason, we had supposed it to be a thing which everybody could do quite easily and naturally. I think Linda realized there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.

The young man she had fallen in love with, handsome, gay, intellectual, and domineering, melted away upon closer acquaintance, and proved to have been a chimera, never to have existed outside her imagination. Linda did not commit the usual fault of blaming Tony for what was entirely her own mistake, she merely turned from him in absolute indifference. This was made easier by the fact that she saw so little of him.

temblorosa de frío y de verdad, como una madre (de Solaris)

Very often people abroad see us talking about our free education as some sort of empty political slogan but in fact it is a reality and a priority. (Interview in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 2000)

We give them the fire insurance salvation pitch, and they buy into it, and then we protect them in here so that none of us has to see what's going on outside the gates. We're in here worshipping a Jesus we've made up, while most of the souls out there, right out there, are crying out for a Jesus that really exists.

Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford. —Cindy Crawford

When you're living your life in endurance mode, you don't expect anything good to happen. I'm not saying that you don't dream about some miracle that would change everything for the better. But you pretty much know it's only a fantasy, and that you have no real control over anything.

People who're nuts never doubt their own sanity. (The Killer's Cousin)

it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.5

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive at this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face– and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. (...) When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.

Just as climate denialism has become core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive as happiness, and I don't believe in it anyway.

It's always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.

All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.

More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression, that I shoved it entirely out of reality.