Quotes About Reality

Too much hope could make it harder to accept reality when the time came.

I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.

If there's a world with ghosts, shouldn't we be constantly walking through hundreds of apparitions of just regular old people?

But falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift once said.

There is a certain way that life ought to be, an ideal way, a perfect way, and there is the way that life is, not quite the opposite of ideal, not quite the opposite of perfect, it just is not quite the way it should be but not quite the way it should not be either; I mean to say that in any situation, only one or two, maybe even three out of ten, things are just what you have been praying for.

I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamp-light. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.

I had never imagined my father dying. I had never inagined my parents dying. When I told Mariah this, she said that no one ever thinks their parents will die, ever, and I had to suppress the annoyance I felt at her for once again telling me about everybody when I told her something about myself.

Je comprends seulement maintenant pourquoi les gens mentent sur leur passé, pourquoi ils disent qu'ils sont une chose autre que la chose qu'ils sont réellement, pourquoi ils s'inventent un être qui ne présente aucune ressemblance avec qui ils sont réellement, pourquoi quiconque voudrait avoir le sentiment de n'être de nulle part, de ne venir de personne, d'être tombé du ciel, voilà tout, complet.

His death was imminent and we were all anticipating it, including him, but we never gave any thought to the fact that this was true for all of us, too: our death was imminent, only we were not anticipating it ... yet.

Death is the only reality, for it is the only certainty, inevitable to all things.

Mariah did not seem to notice what she had in common with the other diners, or what I had in common with the waiters. She acted in her usual way, which was that the world was round and we all agreed on that, when I knew that the world was flat and if I went to the edge I would fall off.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the ameteur for three, or the cry of the critc for five. (from Whistler vs. Ruskin, 1878)

At moments I wonder whether those who go, as I do, for a Full Life, don't get their exact reward, which is that The Full Life is full of crap.

Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?