Quotes About Reality

She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.

Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything...no touch, no contact!

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell and paints the inside walls sky-blue and blocks up the door and says he's in heaven.

You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition...You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

The human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-men seem actually nonexistent

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one's bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.

She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the populace of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible.

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to her than faces, which are no longer very real.

They seemed so free, and were as a matter of fact so tangled and tied up, inside themselves. They seemed so dashing and unconventional, and were really so conventional, so, as it were, shut up indoors inside themselves. They looked like bold, tall young sloops, just slipping from the harbour, into the wide seas of life. And they were, as a matter of fact, two poor young rudderless lives, moving from one chain anchorage to another.

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

Sufficient unto the moment is the appearanceof reality.

It was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist

You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

What liars poets and everybody were!

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick?