Quotes About Reality

It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.

They were prepared for everything except what actually happened.

Be grateful you're not a peeper, sir. Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sicknesses … Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people.

Through the vistas of the years every age but our own seems glamorous and golden. We yearn for the yesterdays and tomorrows, never realizing that we are faced with Hobson's Choice … that today, bitter or sweet, anxious or calm, is the only day for us. The dream of time is the traitor, and we are all accomplices to the betrayal of ourselves.

The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams…never for reality.

Foyle was brought up with a jolt. 'You mean I've been running away from something?' 'Obviously.' 'From what?' 'From reality. You can't accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it . . . try to force it into your own pattern. You attack and destroy everything that stands in the way of your own insane pattern.

The map is not the territory.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.

Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Definitions create conditions.

I'm fated to lose everyone I ever love," April said. "I already know that." "Of course you are," Jet responded in her calm, measured tone. "That's what it means to be alive.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

The truth frightens people because it isn't stable. It shifts every day.

Eddie had come to understand that what a man saw and what actually existed in the natural world often were contradictory. The human eye was not capable of true sight, for it was constrained by its own humanness, clouded by regret, and opinion, and faith. Whatever was witnessed in the real world was unknowable in real time. It was the eye of the camera that captured the world as it truly was.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

But try as you might to protect people from danger, you cannot keep them from their true nature.

What did you see?' he asked then. Nothing,' I told him. 'Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.

It was easy to lie to people who still believed in the truth.

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.