Quotes About Reality

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

That's how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that's the way it ran. The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.

Love is for fools and dreamers, who don't know better.

The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.

Truth in art is truth in circumstances.

There is nothing more amusing to Venetians than watching tourists who think the Grand Canal is all there is to Venice.

Alberta felt her face grow old and shrivelled at her own words. She was a shadow already, half old, distressing, comic. Something happened from year to year, suspicion became knowledge, bad dreams reality. A weariness crept over her, more intense and pervasive than any she had known before. It sat in her back, sapping her strength. She sank down into it as if it were an abyss, sank inwards into gaping emptiness.

The subjectivity of human thought wants to be objective, but objectivity presents itself as subjectivity to subjectivity, which fools human thought into believing it is objective.

It just goes to show. There's ten people in the world and the rest is ghosts and mirrors.

I do believe that belief is the most powerful thing we have in this world. So, if we believe in something enough. And we have faith, we can make it a reality. That is basically the basis of my entire career and my entire life.

If you didn't want to know things, you didn't have to know them. Things didn't become facts until someone actually spoke them. Until then, you could just go on acting just the way you had been acting and even if you suspected there was something that would change everything, you didn't have to acknowledge it; you didn't have to let it in.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

Toda sociedad es un sistema de interpretación del mundo (...) Su propia identidad no es otra cosa que ese "sistema de interpretación", ese mundo que ella crea. Y esa es la razón por la cual la sociedad percibe como un peligro mortal todo ataque contra ese sistema de interpretación; lo persigue como un ataque contra su identidad, contra sí misma

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power. ("Mind Over Murder")

Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

We don't marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never to glimpse it again. How lovely she is, how unearthly lovely.

I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.

Fisher just stood there lost in thought, without saying anything. There is always a rational explanation for everything in this world - whether it's the true one or not. Maybe it is better so. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

But there are three things in this world you can't shrug off: death, taxes – and a girl who loves you.

She passed through them without a glance. The living have no time to look at death; they cannot see it even if they try.