Quotes About Reality

Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.

but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.

What had the sheriff said, something to the effect that most people's public roles were pure bullshit? I wondered if he should not be given an endowed chair at the local university.

I still wanted to believe George Orwell's admonition that people are always better than we think they are.

I didn't intend to hurt her. But when you deal with those who have chosen to inflict great harm on themselves and their loved ones on a daily basis, whatever you say to them about the reality of their lives will either prove inadequate or offend them deeply, and leave you with feelings of guilt and depression. It's not unlike walking through cobweb.

I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, No, it's just an ironic pregnancy.

Even the brightest of dreams-come-true had shadowy recesses.

conservative because "he accepted the need of dealing with things as they were, not as he would have wished them to be."2

when folks wanna believe something, the truth ain't got no place in that compartment.

and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Listen, don't meet your heroes. If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed.

You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.

The sky is realest: the sky cannot Be touched and in the mirror it cannot Be touched. He is enchanted. The rare azur Is flawless; happily blurred blue is no whit Less exquisite than blue unblurred. And what He misses he would never know was there.

Life is just a dream on the way to death.

Sometimes I dream of sleepiness, sometimes I feel like I'm alive.

Strange things are said to have happened in this world — some are said to be happening still — but half of them, if I'm any judge, are lies.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

Fang felt a cold jolt, then dismissed it. Max wasn't dead. He would know, somehow. He would have felt it. The world still felt the same to him; therefore, Max was still in it.

I hoped I wasn't actually dead. That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.

When your own romantic life is falling apart, everyone else's looks fabulous.

Sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality.

Your mind creates your reality. If you expect nothing, you open up the universe to give you options. If you expect the worst, you usually get it.

and I think that everything in life is kind of unreal, isn't it?

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.