Quotes About Reality

Leni sighed. How was Mama's unshakable belief in Dad any different than his fear of Armageddon? Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?

Nina lowered the camera slowly, feeling naked suddenly, vulnerable. Without that thin layer of a glass lens, she was here instead of there, looking at her father, who was dying.

I'd always believed that the truth of a person was easily spotted, a line drawn in dark ink on white paper. Now, I wonder. Maybe the truth of who we are lies hidden in all those shades of gray that everyone talks about.

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." —ANAÏS NIN

Angie looked at her. There was a heavy sadness in her eyes. "I wish I could make everything okay. But some dreams just pass us by. It's the way life is.

She] saw suddenly how hope could break you. How it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all? To prepare?

I feel like Dorothy, back in Kansas, a black-and-white girl in a black-and-white world, with memories in color.

Mama and dad had run off together; theirs was a beautiful, romantic story of love against all odds. Mama had quit high school and "lived on love." That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

On paper, did she and Mama even exist? And what if he found them anyway?

For six hours, Isabelle sat at the table in the apartment on rue de Saint-Simon. They brought in others from the network and gave them tasks: to gather clothes for the pilots and stockpile supplies. They consulted maps and devised routes and began the long, uncertain process of setting up safe houses along the way. At some point, they began to see it as a reality instead of merely a bold and daring idea.

It can't be true," she said. "The worst can always be true," Papa said grimly.

In real life, she saw, it wasn't like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

They might not even have tomorrow. She hated that her first time would be bathed in sorrow, steeped in a sense of having already lost what they'd just found, but that was the world now. One

A cliché is just something that's commonly true.

Two choices: ask for honesty and try to roll with unwanted truths or stick your head in the sand and be lied to.

But no matter how hard they all tried to be normal, their life was a dirty window that couldn't be wiped clean. Everything, every moment, was coated by illness.

You shine a light on hard times. This is what your pictures do. You do not let people look away from that which hurts.

could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn't that what her father's lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.

The truth of my circumstance climbs into the bed with me and takes up too much room.

No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Learn to be happy with real life. Throw away your silly romantic novels.

There's no fair in life and death.

They looked young and clean shaven and eager in brand-new helmets; with medals glinting on their gray-green uniforms. Young most of all. Not monsters; just boys, really.