Quotes About Reality

But all I know – the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself – these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing, these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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.

Oh God! One minute it's my world, and the next I'm the world's fool.

Pas une seconde il n'avait cessé de regarder Daisy et je pense que les objets qu'il possédait changeait de valeur à ses yeux à mesure qu'ils en prenaient une aux yeux de celle qu'il aimait. Il les contemplait parfois avec stupéfaction, comme si l'incroyable et indiscutable présence de Daisy les rendait brusquement irréels.

Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

He had shown it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.

Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I'd rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.

The world only exists in your eyes-- your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to.

the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

But women marry all their husbands' talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.

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. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. 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. 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.

Almost five years! 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. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Young men just don't drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

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