Quotes About Reality

Dear God, please don't grant me one of those magic mirrors. The ones that make a person see only what they want to believe about themselves--not as others actually see them. I'd rather be aware of myself, including the flaws, and keep it real. Amen.

We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood in our hands came from.

Faced with information that contradicts what they believe, people tend to respond in one of two ways. Some ignore the new knowledge and hold to their former beliefs. Others accept the validity of the new information, factor it into their perception of reality, and put it to use.

Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.

People don't change, Lola said. Maybe you're still young enough to pretend that's not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.

I don't know facts, and probably there aren't any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that's what they call it, a fact.

Remembering doesn't change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.

Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.

We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.

An imaginary planet has a role like a clown in a Shakespeare play. Every so often an audience needs a breather, a fresh view. Other planets provide that. But every time I write about another planet it is deliberately so unrealistic that people can't really believe it. In a way it makes our own planet more important, more real."66

Greatness? I have tasted that cup within the last twelve months; do I not know that it is sweet in the mouth, but bitter in the belly?

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.

You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits. - You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn't change what it is.

F)iction is...what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. " —LIFE TOGETHER

numbers have a hold on us. They are powerful—almost mystical. Because we think that numbers represent truth, it's hard for us to imagine that a number can be made to lie.

Epstein was one of thousands, if not millions, of people—undoubtedly mostly men—who've been suckered into thinking a machine was a potential date.

He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.)

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

Because it's a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you're a sucker for it: Isn't story-telling what being human is all about?

Are you a psychiatrist?" "I don't think so." He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. "Then I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte!

His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.

outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp