Quotes About Reality

We go on dates thinking that person is our future husband or wife, without getting to know them, as we live in a fantasy and an illusion of romance.

As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little," wrote Mark Twain, "it's that they know so many things that ain't so.")

Mom points at the gravesites all around us. "We all die, Lucy. Me. You. Everybody. But you know what we do first?" I shake my head. "We pretend that it's not going to happen. We make believe that we're never going to die. do you know what that's called?" "Lying?" I say. "Living, Lucy. It's called living...

Believable has nothing to do with true

Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

An unreal world was much bigger than a real world, and there was more than enough room in it to be yourself and not yourself at the same time.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time...

The world wasn't real anymore. Everything in it was a fraudulent copy of what it should have been, and everything that happened in it shouldn't have been happening. For a long time afterward, Ferguson lived under the spell of this illusion, sleepwalking through his days and struggling to fall asleep at night, sick of a world he had stopped believing in, doubting everything that presented itself to his eyes.

in the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself. Which is as much as to say: lives make no sense.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it.