Quotes About Reality

the room had been lost 'til then. So, if you were in a room, I mean if you were just sitting in a room, could the room you were in get lost?

Na, mondja. Figyelj. Nem szabad többé elhinned minden hazugságot arról, hogy a világ meg van mérgezve. És a bombákat. És a vegyszereket. Mert ebbÅ'l semmi nem igaz. Nem?, kérdi Arthur. Nem, mondja Sophia. Mert akik mindenfélét csinálnak a világban, miért ne a legjobbat akarnák a világnak?

On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we're separate. But it's a delusion.

The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoarding for what they are knows it.

The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoardings for what they are knows it.

He shakes his head. He was a man on a railway platform. There was no story. Except, there is. There always fucking is.

And he looked at the oil out of coffee beans, and at frogspawn, and, and anyway now we know what microbes are and what cells are and that the naked human eye can only see a fraction of what is actually there. And that this - (the spill of water on the table) – is full of life we can't see, and just because we can't see it doesn't mean it isn't. It really really is.

it's like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what's happening right next to their ears and eyes, they'd see it's the same play they're all in, the same world, that they're all part of the same story.

And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we've got reality TV instead, Iris says. And soon instead of reality TV we'll have the President of the United States.

After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they're stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing's a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

It's as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

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

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine.

All's change, but permanence as well"... and continued:   "Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence."   "Truth successively takes shape, one grade above its last presentment...

Oh yes, I admire books. I still do. They can preserve a truth for twice a thousand years and teach it to any who has the skill and cares to read it. They can also fix a lie in stone forever. But worse still, they—the books—can be about nothing at all. Nothing real.

The teacher didn't make people with disabilities out to be heroes or sad stories. It was just a description of the world in which people with disabilities were real and present.

People who deal in truth themselves recognize it when they hear it, just as people who deal in diamonds recognize a real stone when they see it.

I have often wondered why I've survived. Yet I know the answer. It's luck. Luck is a greater factor than anyone who succeeds ever wants to believe. The idea that one is destined to be the person who remains standing, the person smart enough to make all the money, to retain the beauty, is far more seductive. If there is good luck, there is bad luck. That is a reality no one wants to contemplate. But it is reality. I am merely lucky to be alive.

Archie materialized, a vision of how aging men delude themselves into believing they have achieved peak allure.

You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives'—how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

It takes a long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth.