Quotes About Reality

If there was one truth that I'd learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.

Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted", for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other's sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

the thing I came for: [...] the thing itself and not the myth

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is, or ought to be. In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.

You can fake your age or mask it, but the passion that moves the characters has to be real.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

I feel like handling a narrative in fiction is a wonderful way to teach stories that then open a pathway to reality and understanding.

It doesn't hit you until you pull up to the hospital, and you see 'cancer' in big letters, and you're the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.

It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.

It was crazy to say that I have the guidance of Paul Heyman out of all these people. Eight-year-old real me is like, is this real life?

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?

Most of those who pawn things and want to borrow money don't want to be on television. That part of my business you don't see, and I do five or 10 times as much.

No one ever expects a great lay to pay all the bills.

We're all happier when we know less, because the details are frightening and haven't really improved much. The more you pay attention, the more horrifying the world is.

People say that soundstage sets never quite look like reality. But actually, they can. They can be as real as you want as long as you pay attention to the kind of detail that is given for free in a real place.

I still have to work paycheck to paycheck. Being in show business doesn't indicate that you're a 'success,' in my opinion.

I live like most of the people in my district: paycheck to paycheck.

I realize how lucky I am to be able to go a couple months without a paycheck, but a lot of industry people go paycheck to paycheck.

It's a brilliant job. I'm literally paying my mortgage by fighting imaginary dragons.