Quotes About Reality

All will be forgotten, everything you perceived, thought, dreamed, hoped, remembered . . . all the past all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding nose-picking and deathward attempts to make real some desperate desire, like standing upright for a minute in the sun. The sun that will die.

In real life it's the living who haunt you. — Franz Wright, from section 1 of "Observations," Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.

She was right that reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destoy you while you are facing the other way.

To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.

This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.

Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.

THE RAW MATERIAL of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of man, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus—they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.

It's so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don't. If you're like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what's there.

preachers and theologians, who spend so much of their lives talking about God that, unless they are very careful, God starts to lose all reality for them and to become just a subject for metaphysical speculation.

Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true.

I had deep satisfaction in the thought, that the reality of shareholders was not concealed from the eyes of the world, and that I was not alone in aborting the cruelty and brutality of slavery.

Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.

Fredrich Nietzsche

I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centres in his head, i.e., in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.