Quotes About Reality

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.

They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it isn't true.

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (p89 "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong")

Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original." (p80 Mitch Sanders in "How to Tell a True War Story")

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. […]And afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

He didn't speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And yet by his presence, his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.

This next part,' Sanders said quietly, 'you won't believe.' 'Probably not,' I said. 'You won't. And you know why?' He gave me a long, tired smile. 'Because it happened. Because every word is absolutely dead-on true.

Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. 'How's the war today?' somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, 'Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

What normal people perceive as the instant of "now" is in fact just the blanket average of an infinity of time-spikes that spring up and disappear at the interface between the fluid future and the crystallized past. The spikes are quantum extensions of the past into the future, but they're far too brief to have any effect on the world's smooth continuity.

Hurwood nodded. "We're not really in Florida now—or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we're in every other place.

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…

Not everything that is faced can be changed," Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what it.

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what is.

No, truth never gained anyone anything. All it did was anger those who preferred lies and confusion and backspinning in the hope of making themselves look better.

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. And usually tries to leave a better aftertaste.