Quotes About Reality

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.

I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral forced without any claptrap in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward—even an outsider can't judge.

Los recuerdos del pasado no son recuerdos de los hechos, sino recuerdos de tu imaginación de los hechos

Chaque fois que je levais les yeux je voyais mon petit ami complètement gaga parce que j'étais une reine de beauté à la noix! T'étais un vrai gosse! Il a fallu que tu me transformes en princesse! Eh ben, regarde où ça m'a menée. A l'asile! Elle chez les dingues, ta princesse!

But there's no remaking reality

Todo es un error -le dije-. ¿No es eso lo que me has estado diciendo? No existe más que error. Ahí está el meollo del mundo. Nadie encuentra su vida. Eso es la vida.

Elsewhere is wherever you are;

in truth nothing lives in me life my life.

Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else.

fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

Someone to whom the tangible and the immediate are repugnant, to whom only the illusion is fully real.

Depraved? Officer Balich, you are too old to idealize your parents.

Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind.

No solo eso; es que, además, la realidad puede permitirse el lujo de ser increíble, inexplicable, de situarse fuera de toda proporción.

Por outro lado, é justamente o que há de normal nos funerais o que os torna mais dolorosos, mais um registro da realidade da morte que avassala tudo.

For those who prefer a fairy tale to life, a moral: "Reality," concludes the embittered professor who for reasons unbeknown to himself became a female breast, "has style.

But, alas, I could not lift her out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life.

Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong. And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast, measure, revise: it is the surest path to seeing better.