Quotes About Reality

It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just backstory.

Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.

Maybe [Snow White] never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can't kiss a girl into anything.

It's like Goguenar's Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: Everyone's always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that's a load of bollocks; It's convenience.

It's like Great-Aunt Goguenar's Sixth Unkillable Fact: 'Everything just gets so fucked up sometimes and the natural resting state of reality is not to make any goddamned sense if it can help it and you've just got to accept that because it's not going to get any better from here on in.'

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.

The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.

there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.

Lebedeva snapped her fingers. "It's like lying!" she exclaimed. "Well, we understand that, of course! The bigger the lie, the happier the liar.

There are many sorts of lies. You could fill a shop with them. To be sure, lies are terribly common.

Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy.

It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born. And then I woke up—it was only a dream. Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.

I really don't know what you're talking about," said the Speaker of the United State House of Representatives. "We're doing great. Turn on any news channel, they'll tell you. Taxes are low, business is booming, crime is down, the Patriots win the Super Bowl every year, and we're finally getting our country back. I'll admit, it used to be a real nightmare around here.

This is what a grown-up looks like, thought September. Not like the grown-ups in my world who look sad and disappointed and grimy with work and bored with everything.

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

cold glassy surface of reality. I saw the gentle bookish boy you must have been, made old with tedium, wasted effort, unacknowledged kindnesses. I saw the tired, struggling righteousness of you. You were starving for want of love. You were a delicate, civilised changeling, raised among barbarians and apemen.

Happily ever after, like in the books,

You can fool some of the people some of the time—but you'd best not be fooling yourself, the biggest fool of all.

Personal belief system? Is that the problem? That we've all just assumed that truth is what we individually believe? Or is it a collective assumption? That the truth for Germany-and the truth for Britain and Poland and the US- is their own, regardless of how it affects others? Is there no truth- no universal truth- that applies to everyone?

Each of us wages a private battle each day between the grand fantasies we have for ourselves and what actually happens.

is that we don't always get what we deserve but we have to learn to live with what we get.

People would rather hold on to their illusions than face the truth." "It seems to me that people have to know their own truth before they can embrace someone else's," I philosophized. Mark elaborated, "The average public is socially engineered to the point where they no longer think to look within.

In order to express the reality of my past, I would have to reach a public whose point of reference was deliberately distorted through social engineering.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.