Quotes About Reality

Truth and fiction are tangled together in everything human beings do and in every story they tell. Whenever a book claims to be telling the truth, it is wise (as Noah's mother says at one point) to keep asking questions.

Disillusion in an ache that eats into the dreams of goodness, of love, of any value that matters - even to the very belief in life.

The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.

The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.

A journey through all the nooks and crannies of the human experience, spiritual inquiry is the effort to connect with a larger reality, to master the self and its endless puzzles and boundaries. It's the never-ending asking, What is this? What's the point?

Don't worry if they say you're crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It's a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

I tell you what you'll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")

It was built on air and ghosts…it was truly beautiful but it died…because it tried to get real and it was never real.

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

I am never sane, you know -

If this is hell, then hell could not be much, neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.

Kind Sir: Lost and of your same kind I have turned around twice with my eyes sealed and the woods were white and my night mind saw such strange happenings, untold and unreal. And opening my eyes, I am afraid of course to look—this inward look that society scorns— Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.

In a dream, you are never eighty.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.

In woods where the woodsmen told lies, maybe it was the wolves who told the truth.

She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.

It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves—that you could have magic without monsters.

This is what it is to live in the world. You have to give yourself over to the cold, at least a little bit.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories.

What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. . . . Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is 'borrowed' from the Now.

The (serious) game played here makes a move that is the other way around: like (humans) subjects, (natural) objects are framed as parts of events that occur and plays that are staged. If an objects is real this is because it is part of a practice. It is a reality enacted.