Quotes About Reality

This isn't a tragedy. It's just non-fiction.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.

Thank you, but I take no joy in my wedding." "Of course you don't, but still, you must act the part. I often take no joy in my spinsterhood; I have no babes to fill my arms, and yet by acting the part of it, I convince myself that I am not lonely. And sometimes it works.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.

It occurred to me that a lot of beauty has to do with believing it yourself. That half of what we see is just the way it is presented.

But just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not there. And just because you don't remember something doesn't mean you don't miss it. And just because you are used to something doesn't mean it's normal" -Ruby

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell. Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

The Great Illusion.

The title 'Lord of All-Rus' did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kyivan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself 'Lord of all the Franks'.

2. A brain cannot think without motor function. Wrote Feldenkrais, "My fundamental contention is that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality, that these entities are not related to each other in one fashion or another, but are an inseparable whole. To put this more clearly: I contend that a brain could not think without motor functions.

How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

The older I get," observed Mr. van Koppen, "the more I realize that everything depends upon what a man postulates. The rest is plain sailing.

Plato had one Big Idea from which everything else derived. He fundamentally defined reality as that which is permanent and unchanging. Only ideas are permanent and unchanging; anything material deteriorates and decays.

Everything achieves reality insofar as it is conditioned by, or participates in, a pure idea.

Reality is not, as we imagine it to be, difficult and painful. It is always only just as it is: suchness.

What makes us miserable, what causes us to be in conflict with one another? It's our insistence on our particular view of things. Our view of what we deserve or want, our view of right and wrong, our view of self, of other, of life, of death. But views are just views. They're not ultimate truth.

Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone's knowledge of it. (Gravity existed prior to Newton.)

Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' (§ 6.44). 1 believe that a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew him.4 Whether this feeling has anything to do with