Quotes About Reality

But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.

The worst can always be true

Christ. Time is short, don't you understand that? We bump along, blindly assuming we have forever to do things, say things…but we don't. You can feel perfectly fine, and go to your annual checkup on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and discover that your time's up. Game over.

It's just that I have seen firsthand that celebrity is not the utopia I'd imagined, and it has made me question my interpretations of the world around me.

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?

She couldn't let herself be seduced by the idea of credit. Nothing in this life was free, for migrants most of all.

Sometimes life kicks the shit out of you; that's all. It's like the Stones said: You can't always get what you want.

was the dream that had brought her here and she passed it on to me. But, it was a lie. For people like us, anyway.

My room is lined with books, most of them stacked in precarious piles on the bowing bookshelves Louis assembled years ago. They are filled with other people's stories, and I've spent my life disappearing into them. Sometimes, when the nights are dark and silent and I'm alone, I wonder if I would have survived without the escape their pages offered me from reality. Then again, perhaps they just gave me an excuse to duck out of my own life.

It occurs to me how mundane this moment would be if this was really the life I was living.

Nessuno ha la vita che si aspettava, ma è il modo in cui ci si adatta alle difficoltà a determinare se si è felici o no.

The thing is, not every happily ever after needs to end with a Prince Charming

Let them believe that the fairy tales were the fiction, and that everything else was real.

Remember that you control what you choose to believe in," I said. Anyone could look at our farm lives and see toil and squalor, or look at the same lives and see purpose, abundance, and joy. Same plot points, different story. "Very different things can be true simultaneously, and choosing the one with the better narrative is often extremely helpful.

He rolled his eyes. "Fiction lies for the truth.

Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.

In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication.

If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and '90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn't seemed like a serious problem in America.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.

You're entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.