Quotes About Reality

This is what fascinates me most: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality - even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.

So I go to college and I'm standing there looking in the microscope. And there aren't even any paramecia in there at all, 'cause the slide moved. And the instruction is, 'Draw what you see.' And I realize that there's nothing there, nothing at all. But I can't consciously face the fact that this is a symbol of my whole projected four years there, I'm drawing pictures of things that -

And in my case I kept thinking, If I only was stronger mentally, psychologically, and everything, to bear these responsibilities. And in point of fact there was no way anybody could stand that situation. No way. It was not an indication of psychological weakness. It was an indication of not facing reality, but a peculiar kind, you see.

A brand-new tape recorder, completely worn out. Bought with funny money that the store is willing to accept. Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.

maybe I have got to the point when I see something in everything, because I want to see something. The next thing, he thought, is voices. I'll start hearing voices. What can I count on? What can I believe?

You invent it, he thought to himself. And then you maintain it until it's true.

To live is to be haunted.

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up.

Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Everything is true, he said. Everything anybody has ever thought.

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.

You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you. I know, Benteley agreed. I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?

Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?