Quotes About Reality

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where "survivors envy the dead," which seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one's own reality. In other words, it's a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it's a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite.

The 1980 George W. S. Trow essay "Within the Context of No Context" argued that "the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.

Tricks Aren't Illusions

It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.

His talent was appearing to understand obvious realities that other people could not see, expressed with the kind of self-assurance that can only come from extreme wealth.

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

Something that's only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.

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.

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. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.

Whenever someone says something that's both realistic and abhorrent, It makes me suspect everyone else is lying about everything else.

His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that's a critical difference. It essentially makes Ralph Sampson a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave. And within these parameters, four thousand rebounds don't mean shit.

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.

The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don't even enter into the conversation.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

Well, that's how it always seems, until it doesn't.

Its easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality.

Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.