Quotes About Reality

All I know is that I've ruled out wearing fairy wings. When I was nine I wanted to get married in fairy wings, and now I realize that's not cool anymore.

Who can say it's not what we see with our eyes open that is distorted, and that what's described here isn't the true essence of things?" He slowed down outside a door. "Haven't you ever heard old men sigh that life's a dream?

Sometimes it is hard to know what the truth is. And sometimes truth is pain. Easier to hide the truth and make a secret of it, than to face it. -Chapter 22, page 254

I can just hear Aaron saying that it's slight compared with the big topics they usually tackle." "Slight!" I almost shouted. "Why is it that people always think bad, dark things are more real and important than things that lift you up and make you feel life is worth living? You ought to tell them that in a song.

All this is wonderful...but sometimes it seems like a pleasant dream that can't last. So many have died. It's a high price we pay for our place in the world. [Chapter 27, page 308]

Never trust a mirror,' his mother had told him. 'They never tell the truth unless you make them.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer

In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.

L'aspetto in cui l'amplesso e la lettura s'assomigliano di più è che al loro interno s'aprono tempi e spazi diversi dal tempo e dallo spazio misurabili.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

This was mere unfounded prejudice--that seems obvious to me--because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant" could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the "I," the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.

No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form.

Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.

If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn't agree with that memory.