Quotes About Reality

I wondered again if I might not actually be dead-if this was some terrible version of death, which I had momentarily mistaken for a continuation of life.

At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.

I wondered if a novel could have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

They got me reading people like physicist David Bohm with new and passionate interest. He helped me because he turned the essential question upside down. I'd been asking, since everything in the world looks so separate, how can the connections that would seem to be required by this evidence be possible? On the other hand, Bohm was asking, since everything in the world is interconnected, how come everything looks so separate?

The world wasn't going to go away. Ever.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

What someone believes another person thinks is often wrong. That's why the law—our system of law—relies on the closest thing we can get to a fact: observed behavior, acts, and words.

It is harder to imagine a different self now that I am an adult. As a child, I did imagine myself into other roles. I thought I would become normal, that someday I would be able to do what everyone else did so easily. In time, that fantasy faded. My limitations were real, immutable, thick black lines around the outline of my life. The only role I play is normal.

I am more willing to recognize the reality of intractable conflict, and use force when nothing else will serve.

I'm not saying Barra's bad, exactly, but I am saying you think she's good at heart because you like her and want her to be good at heart. It doesn't work that way. If you don't learn to see people as they are, you'll get hurt someday.

They're called cliches because they're true, you know. Besides, life is quite complicated enough...

You know how your eyes can deceive you at times--how a group of shapes and shadows can take on a certain form and then shift into another? It wasn't really like that; there was no physical change in him, he was exactly the same as he'd always been. I knew every line of his long body and every curl on his disheveled black head. I'd just never seen him before. you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? The change is in the heart.

She pushed yesterday, and everything in it, out of her mind, addressing herself, as the sensible should, wholly to the actual moment.

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale—they live in today's reality. *

But I have told the truth. Isn't that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.

I've got to go home. Even if such place doesn't really exist.

If only life could be more like the movies, where characters muddle through things and do what's right in the end. But real life isn't like that.

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent." The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis

To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you've spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don't want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.