Quotes About Reality

He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies.

Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Strike looked down at his own plate: where there should have been chips, there was only salad.

However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

We don't love each other; we love the idea we have of each other.

So I've been forced to the conclusion," said Strike, "that the Bombyx Mori everyone's read is a different book to the Bombyx Mori Owen Quine wrote.

but each of those negative images represented a human whose heart had once beaten, whose ambitions and opinions, triumphs and disappointments had been as real Margot Bamborough's...

As always, he found her better-looking in the flesh than in the memory he had of her when not present. This

Felicità perfetta non esiste.

It was far from the first time he'd encountered the tendency to believe the dead would have wanted whatever was most convenient to the living.

Yeah, well, she ended up exchanging email addresses with these two. Nothing particularly helpful, but we're looking to establish whether they actually met her - you know, in Real Life," said Wardle. Strange, thought Strike, how that phrase - so prevalent in childhood to differentiate between the fantasy world of play and the dull adult world of fact - had now come to signify the life that a person had outside the internet.

there was no romantic whisper of quiet woods or secret garden about them . . .

lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.' Tansy

But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle her for the truth, to struggle to maintain a foothold on reality. How

because it was so much more comforting to believe that language alone could remake the world.

Strike wondered whether Yasmin had lived in a virtual world of anonymous people for so long that probability and plausibility had fled from her reasoning processes.

Well, it's true, isn't it?" said Douthwaite, displaying unvarnished anger for the first time. "And I'm allowed to tell the truth about my own bloody life, aren't I?

the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

There are very few particles, if any, which are entirely real. They almost all have some virtual aspects, though some are more virtual than others.

You have got it exactly. All the other states just vanish. The land of maybe becomes the land that never was . At that point all the other states cease to be in any way real. They become, if you like, just dreams or fantasies, and the observed state is the real one. This is called reduction of the quantum states . You will soon get used to it.

In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.

The trouble with altering the facts to fit the picture is that it's a cumulative exercise. It starts as a game — a bit of a lark really. Then it gets serious, then complicated, then . . . then pleasure becomes pain because you find yourself and everyone else believing the charade — living the lie as if it were the truth.

The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another." Claude Levi-Strauss