Quotes About Reality

Jacob hatte sich immer gefragt, ob es nur einen Spiegel gab. Offenbar war die Antwort Nein.

And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be." William Goldman, The Princess Bride

They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one too. Maybe people don't see the cruelty in your world straight away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

What happened to a book that disappeared into its own story?

As I never saw my father or my mother … my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above" I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

This life is real too. We're communicating aren't we?

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess.

think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he's rich and powerful because he's the cream and has risen to the top. But he's not stupid. He knows he's kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.

Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, 'the stories you tell come true.' If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you'll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.

Uništio sam mu to uvjerenje. Bilo je lažno, naravno, ali održavalo ga je na životu. Vidjevši ga onako jadnog i slomljenog, zapitao sam se je li bolje biti svjestan i o?ajan ili živjeti u raju za budale.

There are some factors you can control, and some you can't. Wishing things were different won't make them different.

End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

Makes me want to tweak reality's gamma slider.

There's no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you're a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who'd do your job every bit as well.

You said I was in love. You were right. But that never happened, either.

Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.

This went on for five minutes. At no time did he disappear. "Can you still see me?" "Afraid so." "Damn!" His eyes snapped open. "Nothing? Didn't my skin turn opaque?

I don't think there's anything wrong with telling the truth. I know it isn't fashionable.

And that's my comfort--that someone else was there and experienced the same thing. How else could I know it was real and not merely a dream?

It's only paranoia, whispered the Wodensfang, If things aren't out to get you...

Great Hero though you are, you cannot make the moving hand of time tick backward. None of us can do that

I didn't want to accept that in order to move forward, I had to walk through it. It was so much easier just to believe there was another path I could take around it and that at the end of that path would be the destination I wanted. It would be easier to want to end up at a lie, instead of the truth.

I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away.