Quotes About Reality

like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds.

no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?" Enoch asked.

he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That

Once in his life, before the war, he had fallen for a girl as quickly as Einstein had for Sonar Taxlaw. That one brief experience with stupid blind love sufficed to make it possible for him to acknowledge its reality and respect its power.

that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

Se podían haber planteado todo tipo de argumentos filosóficos sobre si ese enfoque era mejor o peor que lo que estaban haciendo en realidad, pero, en el fondo, la filosofía no contaba demasiado.

Body parts that unfortunately found themselves on the wrong side of the rift may seem to remain attached. Intense GLAAMR and general disorientation may hide their misshapen form. Many victims will be unwilling to believe in the reality of what has happened to them. The temptation may be strong to leave these attached and hope for the best. Don't do it! Think

The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality […]

Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye, he was watching it on television.

Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun.

The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality:

scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand.

It is the truth," said Oda-sensei. "Sometimes the truth is flattering.

But it turns out that we are wired for intersubjectivity. Our perception of reality is as much social as it is personal. Why are we disturbed by psychotics? Because they see and hear things we don't, and that's just wrong. Why do prisoners in solitary confinement go nuts? Because they don't have others to confirm their perceptions.

which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their "superpower" isn't imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality.

But the ability (at least in theory) of computers to perform the calculations needed to generate three-dimensional graphics suggested a future in which immersive audiovisual experiences might become possible.

Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.

But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.

You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics.

It seems to us indeed that this block of marble brought from Genoa would have been exactly the same if it had been left there, because our senses make us judge only superficially, but at bottom because of the connection of things the whole universe with all of its parts would be entirely different, and would have been another from the beginning, if the least thing in it went otherwise than it does.

Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain.

the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.