Quotes About Reality

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become dissociated and ascribed separate, warring identities.

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal.

Hearing the dreadful things he had said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

You know, Jeffers, that I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them – partly because I have trouble believing that they do exist!

The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old.

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward -- or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exist in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal -- or can be.

And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things that I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all. (pp 171)

Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case.

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

Most people need some sort of illusion to help 'em along … but that knocks one pretty hard, doesn't it?

As a kid, he would have given just about anything to touch a naked Barbie, but he'd never been lucky enough to get within ogling distance. Now that he was afforded a good look at her, he discovered she had a scrawny ass and her knees made weird crunching sounds.

He'd been thinking about a lot of things lately, things that would never happen, things it was best not to think about. Things like waking up with Delaney every morning for the rest of his life and watching her hair turn gray.

Možete neÅ¡to željeti, gospodo Duffy, ali to ne znaci da cete to i dobiti. NeÅ¡to silno željeti nekada jednostavno nije dovoljno.«

Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, refuse to look at it or think about it, doesn't mean it's not there, that it doesn't affect you and the choices you make in your life.

The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie.

Filibusters should require 35 senators to... make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

Experience shows us that most people's votes are based on their biases, not on objective reality. Elections are a collective gut reaction. That any good comes of it at all is the miracle of democracy.

The realities are, there are - you can be entertaining and you can be fun, and you can say things that actually appeal to people. You still have to figure out a way to get to 270 electoral votes. Get votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Come election time, black and white politicians put on their costumes of compassion and care, shake black hands, kiss black babies, sing 'We Shall Overcome' in black , and pray that we will ignore the reality of everyday suffering and the damage that is being done to our future in exchange for our votes.