Quotes About Reality

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past. The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past. The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

But at the same time, I'm guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I've lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.

You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters. Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be.

Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. What they said, when they said it, it is not now.

The thing about building a castle in the air is it's easy. You build up. It's like a little ladder, then you start building a castle in the air. Then, you destroy the ladder. And your castle is floating.

It's a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons.

about. She says that is exactly what she's crying about. That everything is all right. That the world isn't ending. That we'll never tell each other how we really feel because everything is okay. Okay enough to just sit around, being okay. Okay enough that we forget that we don't have long, that it's late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it's not going to be okay.

But at the same time, I'm guilty too. Guilty of playing this role, letting it define me, internalizing the role so completely that I've lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins.

She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number. No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.

Now where am I? You're in the interstitial matrix that fills up the space between stories. Who said that? You did. I did? Wait, who am I? You're you. Oh, good. Thanks. Seriously, where are we? We're in a shuttle. I'm taking you back to where you were in story space.

1) Je ne suis pas un super-héros. 2) Il faut que j'aille travailler. 3) Si je ne devais pas aller au travail, alors je pourrais être un super-héros. 4) Si j'étais un super-héros, je ne serais pas obligé d'aller bosser.

Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

Actually, perhaps they're just trying to remind themselves where they are. After all, sitting there with Jeremy [Kyle] and his iridescent pupils glistening before them, confronted by a studio audience so ugly they'd make John Merrick spew down the inside of his face-bag, the poor sods could be forgiven for forgetting they were on national television and starting to believe they were somewhere in the bowels of hell instead.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.

after all, in all truth there is the seed of falsehood.

Nothing is forever in this world, not even our problems.

and if you haven't lived through it, you couldn't possibly understand how it was.

He was all too aware that no matter how handsome you looked, how full of life and energy you were, underneath your skin was a grinning skeleton.

He said if a tree fell down in a forest, and there was nobody there to hear it, would it make a sound? I think what he meant was that sounds only become sounds when we hear them, otherwise it's just waves that go through the air. So if there were no ears there to pick up the sound waves then is there any sound at all?