Quotes About Reality

I often see it in people who have attained what the monastic tradition terms "detachment," an ability to live at peace with the reality of whatever happens. Such people do not have a closed-off air, nor a boastful demeanor. In them, it is clear, their wounds have opened the way to compassion for others. And compassion is the strength and soul of a religion.

It seems that many men, and some women, cannot give up the illusion of possessing another person. The idea of that person—and "idea" is related etymologically to the word "idol"—becomes more important, more potent than the actual living creature. It is much safer to love an idol than a real person who is capable of surprising you, loving you and demanding love in return, and maybe one day leaving you.

Clara became so immersed in her "made-up" life that she almost began to believe she was the smart, strong, kind girl beloved by classmates who ran here and there boldly and with complete freedom. Then the clock tower struck eight o'clock and broke the spell.

Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

The icon is transparent as a representation of the special reality it depicts; an idol replaces and obscures that reality ... but the difference between icon and idol is purely subjective.

Because she was connected to you. Because even despite her absence, she existed and you existed. You are a fact in each other's lives in the same way that the sea exists even if you never go to the seaside.

I knew her a long time. The truth was we both had certain expectations of each other. In the end, I suppose they were too high.

The secret life is the only real life. Everything else is just a disguise.

Everybody thinks it's going to be different for them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too.

It isn't time that folds, it's space.

If it wasn't possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present's cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?

But as soon as she came here . . . she knew that she had lost what she wanted, that the life she had as a girl was the one she desired always, that she had no need of a prince, but only her dreams of a prince.

but the sudden stark reality that things were never going to be the same again.

One creature's truth is another's lie. (Scroom of Strix Struma)

Don't believe the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing—it was here first.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. —Flannery O'Connor

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

You do not have to see the air to know you breathe it. You do not have to see the truth to believe it and you do not have to have witnessed love to feel it.

to her Christ was actual and real, and for those prepared to perceive this reality suffering need be neither senseless nor solitary

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

It is a challenge, with the global fame, to try to act like I put my pants on one leg at a time, when in fact I have Pippa Middleton help me put my pants on every morning. She's my lady-in-waiting as well.

Love is like a tide. When it's in, everything looks beautiful and inviting. Only when love recedes can you see the debris beneath the surface - the old bottles, the rusty prams, the sewage pipes, the bloated cats and dogs weighted down to drown. The man I had once loved so passionately I now saw as weak, gutted like a fish.

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.