Quotes About Reality

How oft with disappointment have I met, When I on fading things my hopes have set?

But there is always a 'but' in this imperfect world.

There is no person without a world.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear–

Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life, it's just catastrophe.

At what point does one say of a man that he has become unreal? He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger's argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

And yet hope turns out to be let's face it mostly delusion a word derived from Latin ludere meaning "to play a game with oneself or others"...

The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.

Fiction forms what streams in us. Naturally it is suspect.

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

The best fiction is often how we interpret our own lives and what we see as our common due. It is created usually as a means of avoiding reality which, if seriously considered, might negate our ability to strive for what might seem impossible.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.

Sometimes one appears to have more freedom than one actually possesses. It is easy to see what one wishes to see.

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen --- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery --- just stark me.

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

First of all, people are always pretending to be what they are," said his father. "That's basically a philosophical question. Part of being something is pretending to be it.