Quotes About Reality

We'll never feel safe again, and so it's bye-bye innocence. It's been nice knowing you, but you're gone now.

I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.

Wer diese Worte liest - was für ein Bild bekommt er von mir? […] Kein hübsches Bild. Die Worte lügen also, in gewisser Hinsicht jedenfalls. Wie immer.

All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

We believed we were safe. That was the big fantasy.

He [Clemenceau] had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind.

He [Clemenceau] had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen.

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

You cannot become what you already are.

All the things we say. And how little of all the words even touch any reality. Or perhaps they all do if we knew it

We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.

Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.

The implication of "good riddance"—that love would switch off, like an electric light, once you realized the object of your love was dumb, or cowardly, or had bad taste—was not strictly borne out by observation.

learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.

Wasn't that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the "reality" that happened elsewhere?

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.

You are not American citizens or members of the white man's world. The only American citizens are the white people who are originally from Europe. So why fight a losing battle by trying to be recognized as something you are not and never will be. I am not trying to disillusion you but merely telling you the truth.

And that's the thing about marriage. It can look perfect to people from the outside but be utterly imperfect on the inside. The reverse is true as well. No one knows what goes on in a marriage except for the two people living in it.

You can give birth to a beautiful, perfect human being, but requited love isn't guaranteed for her—or for any of us.

But the world is filled with deceptions and betrayals--nearly every life has one--and yet the sun still rises and sets, the world continues on.

It was apparent that there were no facts. Reality was a vague stink that anyone could smell, but no one knew where it came from.

She positions herself on a stool in front of a giant washing machine, watching her garments twirl in flashing patterns of red and white on a sea of black. It subdues her, that clothes can be washed in Boston or Rome and look the same for it, that she can step on an airplane and be anywhere else in the civilized world within a day and wear the same clothes and be the same person. That the small realities stay knitted together!

Why so profane, ask the bookclubbers? Because we are talking here about death, and fuck you if you don't like it: You're going to die, too. This is serious. Fuck fuck fuck.

the staff should work with each child to achieve "a mutually recognized mutual understanding, or a mutually recognized interiority to a same world." To arrive at this understanding—this "intersubjectivity"—staff members should try to enter and inhabit their patients' kinesthetically experienced reality, a reality that Goode characterizes as "thin," immediate, unpredictable, and therefore dangerous.27