Quotes About Reality

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.

In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. I've thought a great deal about my life and my country. I think there is little that can be truly known. My family has been fortunate. Others were less so. As they are often quick to point out.

I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.

No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It's never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?

It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.

What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said. I know you didn't. I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.

Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.

Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here.

The hardest lesson in the world: Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.