Quotes About Reality

People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.

But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

What I mean is something like a closed circuit. Everybody on the same frequency. And after a while you forget about the rest of the spectrum and start believing that this is the only frequency that counts or is real. While outside, all up and down the land, there are these wonderful colors and x-rays and ultraviolets going on.

A market need no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable...

Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "?t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's So hard to explain! Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!

he gets on this ARPAnet trip, and I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange world—time, space, all that shit." "So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz?" "What. Why would they do that?" "Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?

The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch and not go into it.

Increasingly she's finding it harder to tell the 'real' NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther back in time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

At no point in this did Frank think he was dreaming, probably because he seldom remembered dreams, or paid attention to them even if he did. And though this all had the alert immediacy of daytime Mexico in its ongoing dispute with its history, it would someday be relegated as well to the register of experiences he had been unable to find any use for.

Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which my somehow each time be too bring for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumb struck, undefended, scared shitless.

Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.

They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own.

The true sensitive is the one that can share in the man's hallucinations, that's all.

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]

It's always night, or we wouldn't need light. —

He had no illusions about what could be done in the darkroom to enhance a human image, but Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been his than the unfortunate Bert Snidells's, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.