Quotes About Reality

Dreams are at once fruit and outcry against an atrophy of the senses..

Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality.

Existence and proof are inseparables. You have to have the second to have the first. I

The world's a T.V. and hang-ups are commercials.

If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.

I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. –Joan Didion

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.