Quotes About Reality

I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life.

is it like this every night, while we're asleep?

I have met convicted child molesters before. They don't waer badges or brands or tattoos announcing their vice. It's hidden under a soft, grandfatherly smile; it's tucked in the pocket of a buttoned down shirt. They look the rest of us, and that's what makes it so frightening - to know that these beasts move among us, and we are none the wisest. They have girlfriends and wives who have loved them, unaware.

As a kid, his favorite toy had been a snow globe, that held a small town of gingerbread buildings and peppermint streets. He'd wanted so badly to live there that one day he'd smashed the glass ball - only to find out that the houses were made of plaster, the candy stripes painted on.

In the real world, you can't just turn a page and feel better.

Love isn't what you expect it to be. You imagine being drunk on happiness, but the truth is, you worry all the time. Is she ill? Hurt? Might she meet someone else? There's a moment when you realize you've gotten everything you wished for. And right on its heels is the understanding that this means you have so much more to lose.

Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality. He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

Just so you know, I begin, when they say 'Once upon a time'... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

Life is what happened when all the 'what-ifs' didn't . . . .

There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different.

The best lies are the ones that are wrapped around a core of truth.

Okay, but what if death wasn't the ending you've been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that's so long you can't see where it starts or it ends?" She pauses. "Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it's like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.

You may not be able to choose your reality. But you can change it.

If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.

You couldn't argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it really fall? If a character sits in a book and no one reads it, is he truly alive? As

The brain can do a lot of things, Olive said, but it can't distinguish between what's really happening and what you're imagining. That's why scary movies scare you and why you cry at Nicholas Sparks books.

The only thing they'll let you shoot with a camera.

Sometimes we see what we want to, instead of what's in front of us. And sometimes, we don't see clearly at all.

It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

I've always been a loner, and I've never really felt like I belong here. I'm like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door. Or the Civil War reenactors, who growl at each other on battlefields now spotted with baseball fields and park benches. I'm the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.

You lie to convince people you are not a monster . . . not that you are one.

What if the characters in a book had lives of their own after the cover was closed?