Quotes About Reality

I said so little. Days were short. Short days. Short nights. Short years. I said so little. I couldn't keep up. My heart grew weary From joy, Despair, Ardor, Hope. The jaws of Leviathan Were closing upon me. Naked, I lay on the shores Of desert islands. The white whale of the world Hauled me down to its pit. And now I don't know What in all that was real.

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

Queremos comprender, creemos que si vivimos lo bastante vamos a comprender el mundo; dentro de una hora, mañana, dentro de un año,... Pero quizá no importe nada comprender o no.

There was no castle. You were simply listening to a record. A needle, swaying lightly on a black frozen pond, Led the voices of dead poets out into the sun.

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.

To tell the truth we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me.

Poetry is the passionate pursuit of the real.

I'm saying it's totally oblivious to how people feel. Take the ocean, for instance. You can love it, but it doesn't love you back. It will suck you under and steal your breath and beauty can make you cry, or that the sound of the tide coming in at night is the best lullaby you ever heard.

All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, For they dream their dreams with open eyes, And make them come true.

The living moment is everything.

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.

The real is the imaginative failed.

Where TV lets you down, I'm discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world. Like, do buses stop anywhere along the road, to pick up any kind of asshole, or do you have to be at a regular bus stop?

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. C. S. Lewis

Bel let her talk—as a matter of fact it would have been difficult to stop her—and there was no harm in listening as long as she did not allow herself to believe a word Louise was saying. It's a dream, thought Bel. It's a fairy-tale. Fairy-tales don't happen.

I like you to be happy and carefree, but... but nobody ought to live in a fool's Paradise.

This was all the easier because Mr. Marvell was so matter of fact about the whole thing—the picture might have been a still life of a jar of roses, or of a cabbage, rather than the naked figure of his wife. After all, he's her husband, thought Barbara vaguely, and that seemed to help.

Offer him Ardfalloch for three months,' said Mr. Simpson. 'You need the money.' I told him I did not want to let Ardfalloch. 'You will sell a farm then,' he told me. 'Something you must do, MacAslan.' He showed me figures in a book, Donald, and I saw, then, that it was true. Something must be done. Figures are strange things," continued the voice in the darkness thoughtfully. "Columns of figures—and when they are added up—

What's the use of thinking about something which never could happen? It only makes you discontented with what you've got.

But is it?' Guthrie says, waving his hands in the effort to explain. 'We're living in the twentieth century, of course, but are they?