Quotes About Reality

So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound—the spiritual idea—which it represented in stone.

She saw herself, a fading figure, more than half-way now towards the sunset end, within sight even of the shadowed emptiness that lay beyond the sun's dipping edge. She had lingered over-long, expecting a dream to confirm a dream; she had been oblivious of the truth that the lane went rushing just the same. It was now too late. The speed increased. She had waited, waited for nothing. The seller of dreams was a myth.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.

Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.

What one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens.

This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed

No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it's still just a steaming pile of crap.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see it?

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

This isn't fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

How very disappointing truth is sometimes.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. But no less true for that, Daniel said.

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

You can't expect to live in the world like the world's your private myth.

See how it's deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what's happening right in front of our eyes.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere. But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I'd like to know. Everywhere's a here, isn't it?

The world, she said and smiled. Bounteous. But that's what it's all about, isn't it? What? he said. The world being bounteous? No, she said. What we believe is happening.

Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can't see them happening in front of us? They do when they're over, George says. And what about the things we watch happening right in front of us and still can't really see? her mother says.