Quotes About Reality

If you can't find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?

That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment.

You do not realize the power of your own mind. By focusing on the reality you desire, you can create it. Your energy is scattered. Once you learn how to focus and direct it, you are capable of creating miracles. And if the power of one man's mind is that powerful, think of the power of group mind once it is harnessed. The power of the focusing of many people's minds is not only multiplied, it is squared.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version.

The truth of the world is exhausting.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.

Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.

You and I. We're here. So might as well.

What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.

That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.