Quotes About Reality

But, and especially with Linda's help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.

Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.

Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one's weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.

I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not. I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve. But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

You mustn't mind so much. It's all in your head. Well, I live in my head.

I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless.

I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.

We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality — M.

Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.

I don't think she's had much of a life. Well, a life is a life. What does that mean? One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.

Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images'.

You daren't think, so you live in a dream.

And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?

It's all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it's all too hard.

It's madness — Madness is where we live now.

Time had never been visible to him before.

He saw moving pictures. It was not quite like remembering.

It is necessary at this point to recount what actually occurred, as opposed to what was generally supposed to have occurred, on that terrible evening when Lucas killed a man.

I went on seeing him, but it was like acting in some nightmarish play.

Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after;

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .