Quotes About Reality

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For awhile these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.' 'How pleasant then to be insane!

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

The world only exists in your eyes-- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or just characters in one of my novels.

I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.

What was it? Why won't you tell me? I don't want to break down your illusions. My dear man, I have no illusions about you. I mean illusions about yourself.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is. and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

You're not sentimental?' 'No, I'm romantic-- a sentimental person thinks things will last-- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and however pretentious that remark sounds... it is an absolute fact-- so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.