Quotes About Reality

In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.

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

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

In this particular lifestyle the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell, Elias said. We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.

We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and time creations of our own psyche and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear. Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone.

The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.

Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.

in Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space.

Io sono vivo, voi siete morti

Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.

The Empire Never Ended

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards, Dick wrote of these stories. In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

Isn't a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?

But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.

That's what it means to die, to not be able to stop looking at whatever's in front of you. Some darn thing placed directly there, with nothing you can do about it...

Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here.' He tapped his head. 'In the mind, not the gun.

I think, Dr. Stone said, that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time.

The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.

You can't go from people to nonpeople.