Quotes About Reality

on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.

reality, the picnickers were sweltering beneath their clothes, the champagne was warm, and if anyone had thought to take their shoes off they would have had to walk through goose droppings. Still, they were willing to feign jollity, in the hope that their pretense would encourage the real thing.

Certainly for myself I believe I would always wish to know the truth, but then I also wish to never have to face a truth I cannot bear. Being able to look truth in the face might be brave, or it might just mean you have been lucky in the truth you were dealt.

I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuader ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn't she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me—Tell me the truth—had been uttered by a man who was not even real. I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

Everyone creates what he fears.

So traumatic is the idea of jumping out of a window [of a burning building] that it is easier to pretend the fire will never reach us. It is the same with death: we know it is approaching, but we act as if it is never going to come. The vast majority of us, especially here in the west, construct our lives based on the denial of death.

I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn't yet exist on a map." [...] I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

I know all about the facts of life, and I don't think much of them.

My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.

there is something revolting about the way girls' minds so often jump to marriage long before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means.

but it is always dreadful when the pictures in front of one's eyes become meaningless and the real word is there instead and seems meaningless, too.

Things you let yourself imagine happening, never do happen.

I could never explain how the image and the reality merge, and how they somehow extend and beautify each other.

I am not so sure I should like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, and one obviously has to try them sooner or later.

Our Clare doesn't much care for real life,' Drew told Jane. 'What she needs is to live in a book– the kind that no longer gets written.

I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.