Quotes About Reality

Toute la scène avait quelque chose d'imaginaire. J'étais conscient qu'elle était réelle, mais en même temps c'était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d'une projection de ce que j'attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m'étais arrivé auparavant. Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m'arrivaient que lorsque j'avais renoncé à les espérer.

He already understand that the world consisted of two realms, the visible and the invisible, and that the things he couldn't see were often more real than the things he could.

When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of the other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter.

Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs's soul was gradually given back to him.

The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.

We are not where we are . . . but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

The human body lives in the mind of one who possesses a human body, and to live inside the human body possessed of the mind that perceives another human body is to live in a world of others.

Et ce monde étrange continue de tourner.

Significa que no puedes vivir sin los demás -dije-. Cuando están ahí en carne y hueso, el mundo real es suficiente. Cuando estás solo, tienes que inventarte personajes, los necesitas para que te hagan compañia.

The mind cannot win over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much, it quickly shows itself to be matter as well.

By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. He has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and 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.

La única constante en este mundo es la mierda, muchacho.

If it still shocks me to report what happened, that is because the real is always ahead of what we can imagine. No matter how wild we think our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now. Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does.

Una mentira nunca puede deshacerse. Ni siquiera la verdad es suficiente.

nothing was real except chance.

No, there is nothing people will not do, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you will be.

if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real.

cuando una persona es lo bastante afortunada para vivir dentro de una historia, para habitar un mundo imaginario, las penas de este mundo desaparecen. Mientras la historia sigue su curso, la realidad deja de existir.

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 have. And never really there.

Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

But even the facts do not always tell the truth.

The book was a work of fiction. Even though it was based on facts, it could tell nothing but lies. I signed the contract, and afterwards I felt like a man who had signed away his soul.

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.