Quotes About Reality

You're dead and you have to accept it.

To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or the sun; it cannot be contained.

Your sordid life is your sordid life. You shouldn't live it if you don't like it.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a boy telling beautiful lies?

Things happen, I thought, and we respond. That's what it all comes down to. To believe anything else, as far as I could tell, was simply an illusion.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

My fantasy life. Without it I'm afraid to exist.

She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know.

That politicians who smiled at us and kissed our babies blue eyes shining with triumph well knew we were falling into our graves kicked by them as they counted our votes.

In an oppressive society it may well be that *all* fantasies indulged in by the oppressor are destructive to the oppressed. To become involved in them in any way at all is, at the very least, to lose time defining yourself. To isolate the fantasy we must cleave to reality, to what *we* know, *we* feel, *we* think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing both the dark self and the light.

He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them, on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him, as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?

He understands that creating a meal means creating your own reality...

Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all? In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

The only thing to transcend is the idea that there's something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.

It is not often that the real world conjures worse than what we can imagine.

We are all more–and less–than what we seem.

Remove the crown and the fine clothes, and you're left with a fairly ordinary man.

You are who you think you are. You are what you remember.' 'You sure about that?' 'If you're not, then what the fuck are you?' 'What if you don't remember anything?' 'Ah,' Jason said, 'then you're in trouble.

The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-story building is heard to say as he passes the fiftieth floor, 'So far, so good!

We don't have to fully perceive or understand the underlying nature of our world to negotiate it well. Our senses and reasoning powers evolved as they did because they work just fine in the everyday, nonphilosophical business of survival. Mental constructs of reality are imperfect, but indispensable, ways to organize the otherwise bewildering phenomena of the world.