Quotes About Reality

Stripe felt frozen. To be so high and not high at all! It only looked good from the bottom.

It occurred to her that the world tells lies every day,—telling on the whole much more lies than truth,—but that the world has wisely agreed that the world shall not be accused of lying.

that the facts often concealed the truth.

We often fool ourselves into believing that the "good old days" were actually good, but this is far from the truth.

She felt something inside her turn to stone and fall down into her gut, where it lay cold and hard and uncomfortable. Which was impossible, of course. Human organs did not turn to stone and certainly could not shift into the stomach.

Injustice always captures the attention of the young,' she said. 'But as we get older we discover how difficult it is to change the world, and we learn to turn our eyes away from what we can't fix until we no longer see injustice at all.

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow

Reality is wrong. Dreams are for the real.

What is it that the child has to teach? The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not. And the child is right.

The world is absurd. Ugly absurd. To repair ugly absurdity, you can't just be normal. You need an alternative absurdity. A beautiful absurdity. We call it 'divine madness'.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.

But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (en me retraçant ces détails, j'en suis à me demander s'ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.

I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.

If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible. —Talmud, Berakhot, 6

Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.