Quotes About Reality

Concentrate on why you're here, I tell myself. You have a hawk to fly. Ever since my father died I'd had these bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world became unrecognisable.

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine.

They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.

Huge bouts of déjà vu. Coincidences. Memories of things that hadn't happened yet. Time didn't run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates

My vision blurs. We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

I knew I wasn't mad mad because I'd seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them - that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky this might somehow be revealed to me.

What I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can't pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen.

Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.

With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.

Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.

I often think it would be such a luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. [...] There would be some sort of doctor there to tell me: "Don't worry, Mary, it's just that you're mad. Now be quiet and take this pill." And I would think, So that's all is is, and I would be glad. But aloud I would say, "What? I'm perfectly sane! You're mad...." Only mildly, though; just for show, really.

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I'd hide myself away in them, setting two mirrors to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me's. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.

I don't set too much store by dreams, but it's probably unwise to ignore this kind. These are the kind of dreams that show you you're not doing so well, that you haven't accepted what you thought you'd accepted, that you're a mess, lying there like you've been hit by a bus, your heart and mind standing over you tutting and trying to figure out what even happened, never mind fixing it.

It was hard to keep a straight face, but Harriet didn't laugh. Everybody around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived.

Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn't real.

Mary. If you were real I'd run away with you forever.

Maria Pavlovna)'s "Russian life was over." She and her kind had, she sadly admitted, "outlived our epoch and were doomed." "Everything disappears into the past, everything which is good everything which is bright and the only thing that's left is the terrible reality.

I know too much to go back and pretend.

A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.

Just as London is not really England, Copenhagen is not, I am reliably informed, 'the real Denmark'.