Quotes About Reality

Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?" "Maybe everyone does

Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?" "Maybe everybody does

Open your eyes, and see what you can see with them before they close forever

The things that look fixed in this world, child--mountains, wealth, empires--their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

Maybe in the old days men did walk the earth as beasts, and a city of birds floated in the heavens between the realms of men and gods. Or maybe, like all lunatics, the shepherd made his own truth, and so for him, true it was.

A fourteen-year-old girls sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. "And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet"—she taps the end of his nose—"it's true.

The wizard laughed. "Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real." "Wrong," I said, "it does exist. Even if you don't believe in it, I do. Otherwise what's it all been for?

If it is a hallucination, let it be.

By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.

What the war did to dreamers.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

You can't be a bird, then cry about not being able to fly.

To put the matter bluntly, no sense at all can be made of the virtue of purity if sodomy is countenanced or even celebrated. That is because the virtue is founded in reality, and the vice depends upon denying the reality.

Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority:

God, or nature, has no use for such categories as good and bad.

You're never too young to die.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.

That's why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.

There are two worlds. The world you understand and the world you don't. These worlds exist side by side, sometimes only centimeters apart, and the great majority of people spend their entire lives in one without being aware of the other. It's like living in one side of a mirror: you think there is nothing on the other side until one day a switch is thrown and suddenly the mirror is transparent. You see the other side.

Life may imitate art – but it usually falls short of it.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative.

But that's how it is when you're a kid, isn't it? You have all these dreams and, unless you're lucky, they never amount to anything.

From Pünd's experience, people who were so insistent on the truth were very rarely telling it.

But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's ones of the reasons we enjoy it.