Quotes About Reality

People like to think that their convenience is important. Daniel had found that as a general rule the universe didn't agree, and that other human beings tended to be a subset of 'the universe' in this regard.

It's only a story, isn't it?... Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?

If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise? Of course it is, she replied calmly. How did you reach that conclusion? Beldin demanded. Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear. But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty? Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

Heroes aren't allowed to be nervous. Who made up that rule? It's a known fact...

I want to set the record straight. The record's never straight, you idiot! Haven't you ever read 1984 ? They rewrite the record anytime it doesn't suit them. You're spinning your wheels and exposing your bare fanny for nothing.

Refusing to talk about something wouldn't make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.

Fear's a part of life, Mandorallen, and it's the only life we have.

In your view, evil's no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what's possible and impossible?

Following the evidence, I concluded that individuals fare best by constructing equity-oriented, broadly diversified portfolios without the active management component. Instead of pursuing ephemeral promises of market-beating strategies, individuals benefit from adopting the ironclad reality of market-mimicking portfolios managed by not-for-profit investment organizations. The

I was a normal guy who got sent to Iraq and became crazy, so they sent me back to America to become sane, and now it's America that's driving me crazy.

To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

Capital T-truth is about life before death.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.