Quotes About Reality

The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.

Magical thinking makes you crazy — and renders everything possible.

Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit.

she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Time is not what it is but how it is felt...

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, "It's two o'clock in the afternoon!" and so we put down our glasses and sigh.

It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale!

our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. Quickly you become hysterical. Consequently I can't tell whether the news coming out of my home is really as bad as it appears to be, or whether objects perceived from three thousand miles away are subject to exaggerations of size and color.

It's so funny how many people today really believe themselves to be the most advanced people who ever lived, 'the arc of history bending towards justice' or whatever the quote is. To me, being attendant to history is a kind of resistance. It offers the possibility of alternative worlds, that there is a reality outside the one we are living in.

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.

But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.

You don't come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.  Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢ Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.

That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.

We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses—a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame—will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.