Quotes About Reality

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi.

John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.

The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.

They looked like frogs who'd been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.

You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.

When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.

The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana? No. I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana' He sighed. It was just this thing in the middle of a field.

Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts.

She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth. -Terrific Mother

All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.

Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.

I try. What can I say?" She pauses. "Is all this really happening? I keep thinking that soon it will be over—the life expectancy of a cloud is supposed to be only twelve hours—and then I realize something has occurred that can never ever be over.

Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems. Somewhere in between lies realty.

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

War is wonderful, until someone is killed.

Le monde ne sait que vous tuer comme un dormeur quand il se retourne le monde, sur vous, comme un dormeur tue ses puces. Voilà qui serait certes mourir bien sottement, que je me dis, comme tout le monde, c'est-à-dire. Faire confiance aux hommes c'est déjà se faire tuer un peu.

Acreditava no corpo dela, não acreditava no seu espírito. Considerava-a como uma encantadora emboscada, em relação à guerra e em relação à vida.

Viaggiare è utile, fa lavorare l'immaginazione. Tutto il resto non è che delusioni e fatiche. Il nostro viaggio è interamente immaginario. Ecco la sua forza. Va dalla vita alla morte.

There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.