Quotes About Reality

Who of those born in future generations will believe this? I myself who saw it can hardly believe that such was possible.

But real life is not art.

Whether we do this explicitly or implicitly, we must learn to extricate ourselves from the narcissist's constant distortion of reality.

Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

In 1891, Princess Louisa of Tuscany married Prince Fredrick Augustus, the heir to to the Saxon throne. The Prince won Louisa over with his gentle manner and striking blond good looks. Yet years later, disenchanted, she wrote in her memoirs, 'Although every princess doubtless at some time dreams an Ideal Prince Charming, she rarely meets him, and she usually marries some one quite different from the hero of her girlhood's dreams.

Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass. —Michel de Montaigne O

May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it's all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don't do anything truthfully anymore, Lenù. And I've learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.

To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.

You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything.

What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.

I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus?of every isolated inch of skin?to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.

Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense

In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.

Nelle favole si fa come si vuole e nella realtà si fa come si può.

I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast.

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.

the disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.

Volví a sacar novelas de la biblioteca circulante, las leía una tras otra. Pero a la larga no me hicieron bien. Proponían vidas intensas, diálogos profundos, un fantasma de la realidad más apasionante que mi vida real. Así, para sentir

de pequeña sabía que nos moríamos, siempre lo he sabido, pero nunca pensé que fuera a pasarme a mí, y ahora tampoco termino de creérmelo.

reaccionaba explicándome, de hecho, que yo no había ganado nada, que en el mundo no había nada que ganar, que su vida estaba llena de aventuras diferentes y desatinadas igual que la mía, y que el tiempo sencillamente se escurre sin sentido alguno, y que era bonito solo vernos de vez en cuando para oír el sonido loco del cerebro de la una resonando dentro del sonido loco del cerebro de la otra.

Eliminemos todos los filtros que nos impiden saborear con plenitud este estar aquí y ahora, verdaderos.

Eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. She mocked me at length on that point: I untie the ribbon—Elena Greco—and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks.