Quotes About Reality

Neo-Liberalism promised us a Global Village and gave us a Potemkin Village.

It's a good thing we don't know when we start out that when we arrive we haven't gone anyplace. What's wrong with success? Kelly asked, exasperated. You just walked out on the biggest hit show on Broadway, something you'd always wanted. Why did you leave? Because, Kelly, I said slowly, nothing, but nothing is half as good as you expect it to be.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

In the real world as in dreams nothing is quite what it seems. -The Book of Counted Sorrows

Reality isn't what it used to be.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

Everyone talks about justice, but there can be no justice where there is no truth, and these are times when truth is seldom recognized and often despised.

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose-if we dare.

I believe our recognition of reality's complex dimensions is a consequence of our solitude.

To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.

Lots of people are unable to see all kinds of truths right in front of their eyes. The world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.

As for self-deceit, most people find it as essential for survival as air. You rarely indulge in it.

on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.

Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84

Nothing is one hundred percent reliable this side of paradise, except that your cell-phone provider will never fulfill the service promises that you were naïve enough to believe.

By their subtle reversal of all images, mirrors seemed to be windows to another world in opposistion to this one, a world where everything appeared familiar but was infact profoundly different

Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The

There are those who take upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless

In my experience, a castaways's worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.

There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh. God does not exist.