Quotes About Reality

Was there only one world, after all, that spent its time dreaming of others?

There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time.

The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude.

What were these mysteries? Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

Il n'y a pas d'ailleurs

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

There's no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way.

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're people.

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.

You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.

Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before.

Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach-that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again.

But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, It doesn't get any better than this, they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.

Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.

Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it.

How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination.

You know what I've come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.