Quotes About Reality

I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality

Every time I learn the truth about something, I'm disappointed

The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.

The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

Maybe I don't need a relationship after all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there's something else out there. But there really isn't. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It's the same true story, even when it isn't.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.

there's no such thing as middle-class. The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class, it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.

So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix : In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning.

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn't there.

Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show.

songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

The defining line from Frank Herbert's Dune argues that the mystery of life "is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced." My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It's a fantasy for people who want to solve life's mysteries without having to do the work.

Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.