Quotes About Reality

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded her in.

Romances serve but to feed the imagination of the young; they add nothing to the sum of truth.

The years that are gone seem like dreams--if one might go on sleeping and dreaming--but to wake up and find--oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.

As the devoted wife of a man who worshipped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.

She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness—not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.

As the devoted wife of a man that worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams

That is surely the truth, at least for now. But perhaps you have not noticed: the truth is forever changing.

But let's not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.

Everything, as you well know . . . cannot always be sweetness and light.

Things are not at all what they seem to be: oh no, not at all.

Everything, as you well know (having lived in this world long enough to have figured out a thing or two for yourself), cannot always be sweetness and light.

Reader, do you believe that there is such a thing as happily ever after? Or, like Despereaux, have you, too, begun to question the possibility of happy endings?

Do not hope; instead, observe" were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

Perhaps this is a dream, said Madam La Vaughn from her chair. Perhaps the whole thing has been nothing but a dream.

They lived happily ever after. It said so. In the book. They were the last words on the page. Happily ever after. Despereaux was sure that he had read exactly those words time and time again. Lying on the floor with the drum beating and the mice shouting... Despereaux had a sudden, chilling thought: Had some other mouse eaten the words that spoke the truth? Did the knight and the fair maiden really not live happily ever after?

Normalcy is an illusion, of course," said William Spiver. "There is no normal.

You learn to ride on the path and keep your eyes open so you can see what is there, not what you wish were there.... And then after all you might discover that what is there is what you wished for all along.

Can we ever see the truth when desire blinds us? Or do we call it the truth because it is what we wish to see?

That is true. But nevertheless, you are like the prisoners in the cave, your legs and necks shackled by your maps and your walls so that all you can see is the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave. You think they are the truth, but they are only a shadow of the truth, which lies—" He gestured to the sky and the plain and the distant spiral curl that was the growing city of Sarai. "—out here, under the gaze of the sun and the moon and the stars.

Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one

So here is what actually happened, what happens still: the scene on its parallel track to now, to me: linear and constant, never passing into the past, never speeding into the future.

Lesson learned. To succeed as an architect in this world is to sacrifice vision to reality. The field of architecture pretends to be art, and sometimes a house design that is real and true gets recognition, but in reality, success is more often a business. A little seed of brilliance that had germinated and begun to sprout deep inside Duncan withered and died that afternoon.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.