Quotes About Reality

Lo mejor de mi vida, y quizá lo peor, sucede en mi mente. Lo que allí se genera, ideas, sueños, anhelos o imágines lancinantes del deseo, rebasa -con mucho- las evidencias avasallantes de lo real

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Een van de dingen die ik leerde tijdens het schrijven van de roman, en ik heb er veel geleerd, was hoe moeilijk het is om nie te hechten aan de valse schijn van waarheid die een geschreven pagina wekt.

Y qué es la verdad? —Respondió José. —Unas veces lo contrario de la mentira; otra veces, lo contrario del silencio.

Quien no ha tenido como yo el privilegio de pasar buena parte de su vida en un manicomio tal vez ignore esta gran verdad: que todos los allí encerrados perciben claramente la locura de los demás, pero ninguno la propia.

Lo único que puedo asegurar es que en ninguna ocasión, ni siquiera en los más críticos bretes, he visto, conforme suele contarse, pasar ante mí mi vida entera como si fuera una película, lo que siempre es un alivio, porque bastante malo es de por sí morirse para encima morirse viendo cine español.

Una cosa es planear las cosas en la cama, en las noches de desvelo, con los ojos clavados en el techo. Ejecutar el plan con el que soñamos es otra cosa bien distinta.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

Where life is there is death, reasons the vulture, and where there's death there's hope.

All gold is fool's gold.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

The shock of the real.

The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy—this is the real, Smith would have said, if he'd wanted to. If he felt like it. All the rest is androgynous theosophy.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.