Quotes About Reality

Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and have to go on living as a ghost. - You have a poet in you but it's a damned morbid one!

There was no damned romance in our poverty.

Parecía especialmente cruel, por tanto, el que tres días después, en el hospital, el médico entrará en su cuarto y le dijera que padecía algo de lo que jamás podría curarse, y que lo único que podía hacer era controlarlo, como si el control, para un chico de dieciocho años que quiere vivir a tumba abierta, no fuera la negación misma de la vida.

We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dangerous creature on earth.

Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him.

Because God's reality is reality, there is no way to escape it. Because it is goodness itself, there is no way to defy it with anything but evil. When it comes to the politics of rebellion and change, the rebel can either seek to work in partnership with God's creation or find himself outside it and thus in hell.

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi)

It is the paradox of virtue knit into the fabric of reality: you will not be free unless you are virtuous; you cannot be virtuous unless you are free.

Before you lose things, you don't really know you can lose them,

28 It is as if he had begun to suspect—to feel, to sense, to imagine—that there was a realm beyond nature, a living reality that nature only symbolized.

At the movies — in the arts — conservative reality almost always comes disguised as fantasy whereas leftist fantasy comes disguised as reality!

That was the trouble with searching for the truth. It wasn't always pleasant. It wasn't always something you wanted to find.

I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw. So

There is something that lessens the horror of a crime when one sees the criminal—who has been depicted as a monster—is just like any other man.

the very fact that the mind can be deceived implies that it can be not deceived, that it can know things rightly—deep things—beauty, truth—just as they are.

Meaning is above nature—it is supernatural—because it is the idea that nature expresses.

I can't compete with the woman in your head, Cam. I don't even know if she's real.

Creation is a fractal: it is metaphors all the way down. The three-part Logos creates man, man creates metaphors for reality, reality is a metaphor for the Logos.

And music, your music, it teases at my ear. I turn and it fades away and you're not here! Let hopes pass! Let dreams pass! Let them die! Without you, what are they for? I always feel no more than half-way real 'til I hear you sing once more!

What I want and what's possible aren't necessarily compatible.

I left the warehouse at 8.00am. I don't believe in 8.00am. It exists, though. 8.00am is incontrovertible evidence that evil dwells in the world.

When no amount of evidence can convince you that your worldview might be inaccurate, then we've exited the realm of reason and entered religious territory. This is why I laugh at the notion of reconciling faith and science. Science is based on the premise that logic and reason can tell us the true nature of reality. Religion is based on the idea that when logic and reason don't support a predetermined view of reality, they are at fault.

if nobody can contradict the story, then it's pseudoreal,

It's a man's job to decide which of a woman's fictions to maintain..." Allan couldn't remember who said that, but it still rang true.