Quotes About Reality

I'm always looking for evidence to support my conjecture that celebrity in Hollywood is sort of like a Joel Peter Witkin photograph: It looks like a big lush banquet table filled with abundance and cornucopias, and then if you look at it closer you see that all the fruit is made of wax and that entree in the middle of the table is actually a dead baby.

Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle, true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware of. page 302

who having learnt the art of self-tormenting, are diligently and zealously employed in creating an imaginary world, which they can never inhabit, only to make the real world, with which they must necessarily be conversant, gloomy and insupportable.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast breathing skin, will insist otherwise.

I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.

The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.

All our stores are more or less made up, after all.

Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?

Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.

and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.

Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?

The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I'd learned over the years. But

Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.

Since the dawn of humanity, birds have inspired infinite beauty, happiness and wisdom. They're one of our strongest connections to our natural home and so to life and to reality itself.

From a human point of view, out bodily existence is a fairytale. At any rate, to the inhabitants of the human world, 'heaven' and 'the next world' are both nothing but fables.

You can't deceive me with a dream.

Whether you understand it or don't understand . . . whether you accept it or not . . . what is, is. That's all there is to it.

This isn't Tokyo.

Did we step into some lame video game or what?

Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves.

The truth of the matter is that I had been knocked so a-cock by the notion that I didn't really care tuppence for Corinna that I wasn't quite certain at the time of my own complete sanity. It comes as the devil of a shock, you see, to realise you've let a milk-and-water miss with a pretty face charm you out of your senses, and that you've been building your life for two years around a girl who never existed except in your own imagination

Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.

But do you know what? Gravity doesn't care! It will always pull things down, and I may as well plan on it.

The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.