Quotes About Reality

The outsider never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of the West. The West never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of itself.

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

We keep coming back and coming backTo the real: to the hotel instead of the hymnsThat fall upon it out of the wind.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

The world is a force, not a presence.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Gubbinal" That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.