Quotes About Reality

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;

Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.

this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: 'Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it.' Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality

we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse

Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there?...And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble'.

the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.

Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.

man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything's slip-sliding around and there's nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.