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6bdd2e8 I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing. poverty wealth reality love knowing fame teach facts school Neil Gaiman
a9b5749 It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. qotd madness reality Philip K. Dick
133e114 We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It's time to put an end to this. It's time for us to let ourselves be loved. those-who-love-us to-be-loved true-love people humanity learning reality inspirational-life inspirational-quotes life-and-living life-lessons love inspirational inspirational-love what-matters growing real-love reality-of-life C. JoyBell C.
dc526b1 Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. reality real-life Philip K. Dick
be9f98b It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. mankind reality humans Rick Riordan
b3dadaf Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. escape freedom reality intoxication Anaïs Nin
416b0de Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. time reality past injuries scars memory Cormac McCarthy
0c73013 The real world is where the monsters are. world reality Rick Riordan
cc8c329 Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. understanding reality princess-irulan order Frank Herbert
7343882 Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. mind human reality intellectual George Orwell
7b00376 "La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas." ( )" existence reality ruse ruses sleight-of-hand tricks devil Charles Baudelaire
c750923 Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. pain reality Anaïs Nin
8f6be58 There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened. reality past denial impossible logic Douglas Adams
f0a971e "How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all? Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down." reality love only-forward Michael Marshall Smith
f4e0078 "How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all? Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down." -- reality love only-forward Michael Marshall Smith
e8e0dea Humankind cannot bear very much reality. reality T. S. Eliot
9f96db0 I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching. reality Chuck Palahniuk
129846d We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination. mourning grief suffering reality personal-experience others experience C.S. Lewis
1418a39 If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. solitude reality Jodi Picoult
90d0709 In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality. reality Haruki Murakami
fd120d6 The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves. reality Kahlil Gibran
1c25ff6 Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear. reality return Margaret Atwood
6bdf9c2 When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you. madness reality manic-depression mental-illness Marya Hornbacher
e80079e You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God. reality god inspirational J.K. Rowling
b3a7693 Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. reality life truth strangeness invention Arthur Conan Doyle
5dacab3 Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained. reality Alice Sebold
2858458 There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations reality happiness Jodi Picoult
99fd141 It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. reality real movies anthony burgess
7ddb92a As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist. fiction romance reality message-in-a-bottle nicholas-sparks Nicholas Sparks
2552534 Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books. reality truth Ursula K. Le Guin
195a1f4 As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end. reality harsh-truth neil-gaiman Neil Gaiman
2f79abe The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool. In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun. fiction reality on-fiction Darren Shan
b03e0b9 If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own. sacrifice reality well-being selflessness Melissa de la Cruz
ae57116 I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. world reality hunger Neil Gaiman
1c4ba75 Il n'y a de realite que dans l'action action reality philosophy inspirational handeln existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre
0922ae4 It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. reality Virginia Woolf
8dafe1c Il n'y a de realite que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.) reality philosophy inspirational handeln existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre
faf92e5 Every now and then, I'd meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I'd stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn't understand it. I still don't. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone. relationships reality Nicholas Sparks
7a07919 " "If freckles were lovely, and day was night, And measles were nice and a lie warn't a lie, Life would be delight,-- But things couldn't go right For in such a sad plight I wouldn't be I. If earth was heaven and now was hence, And past was present, and false was true, There might be some sense But I'd be in suspense For on such a pretense You wouldn't be you. If fear was plucky, and globes were square, And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee Things would seem fair,-- Yet they'd all despair, reality identity if contradictions opposites poetry-quotes E.E. Cummings
0cf13ee It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality. reality Haruki Murakami
a77cb77 "Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true." depression reality truth Andrew Solomon
5c88d0c Life keeps throwing me lemons because I make the best lemonade... reality motivational life inspirational King James Gadsden
4b0f220 if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones. fiction reality imagination fantasy humor imaginary illusions on-fiction Norton Juster
4dc3617 "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself. But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit." -- reality honesty philosophy truth sincerity Harry G. Frankfurt
7ea4b21 "It's like Dungeons and Dragons, but ." Jace was looking at Simon as if he were some bizarre species of insect. "It's like what?" "It's a game," Clary explained. She felt vaguely embarrassed. "People pretend to be wizards and elves, and they kill monsters and stuff." Jace looked stupefied. Simon grinned. "You've never heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" "I've heard of dungeons," Jace said. "Also dragons. Although they're mostly extinct." Simon looked disappointed. "You've never killed a dragon?" "He's probably never met a six-foot-tall hot elf-woman in a fur bikini, either," Clary said irritably. "Lay off, Simon." "Real elves are about eight inches tall," Jace pointed out. "Also, they bite." reality fantasy Cassandra Clare
688191c [...] I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled. I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place. I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could. spirit reality dreams soul L.M. Montgomery
503f538 No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. words story history humanity reality semiotics truthful narrative memory Roger Zelazny
09da915 Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then. reality Philip K. Dick
fe607d0 It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to. reality truth game-of-thrones George R.R. Martin
ac45d02 But do we know how to make love stay?' I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day. romance reality love Tom Robbins
d0993fe The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head. thoughts reality Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
8057d91 I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real. reality Hunter S. Thompson
c240bd0 Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing. existance reality William S. Burroughs
895bcf0 There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. stars reality night city Hubert Selby Jr.
10a9cac Your opinion is not my reality. reality motivational inspirational opinion Steve Maraboli
e0aba1e When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. reality wisdom Henry David Thoreau
95b8284 I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone. reality Diane Setterfield
869fb40 Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. mind reality Haruki Murakami
4bc1d33 Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends. reality Alan Moore
dd30055 The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. fiction reality inspirational huxley Aldous Huxley
661e1c8 In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal. reality imagination inspirational eternity L.M. Montgomery
75308d8 A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead. I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin. reality imagery jane-eyre expectation horror Charlotte Brontë
0555d62 "We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel." reality leary consciousness Hunter S. Thompson
34eab66 He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. reality Cormac McCarthy
18a9d18 "In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal." reality imagination inspirational L.M. Montgomery
6ee9ad7 Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better. reality Oscar Wilde
ade1e90 Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. reality salman-rushdie Salman Rushdie
858a68d What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe. reality truth observation Michael Connelly
01324f9 I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) poetry reality Sylvia Plath
e784018 It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours. reality mental-illness Philip K. Dick
7f4becc Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office--the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement--is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick. depression future reality happiness life assistance bupropion hays-office measurement mentorship publicity soothsaying horoscopes uncertainty-principle werner-heisenberg self-delusion perception virtues writers smoking Christopher Hitchens
7227e12 Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize. rain reality Haruki Murakami
97ff47c That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned. reality Nicholas Sparks
e515c1f Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? reality sexing-the-cherry jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
9c999c3 Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time. Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...) Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality is truth. time lies reality past truth untruths Jeanette Winterson
b3d744d Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine] reality Kresley Cole
e9585b7 What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream. reality dreams surprise Franz Kafka
5977d96 Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. writing reality novels realism writers Michel Houellebecq
4eabf5c God is the same, even though He has a thousand names; it is up to us to select a name for Him. reality god Paulo Coelho
9c3fa43 "A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer." reality mystical-encounter unicorn Tom Stoppard
df3af0b Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction. reality philosophy psychology Slavoj Žižek
0b19d18 Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist. people reality Terry Pratchett
347d068 A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. reality life-lessons intellect Hunter S. Thompson
a17ff15 "Liking is more important than loving. It lasts. I want what is between us to last, Luke. I don't want us just to love each other and marry and get tired of each other and then want to marry some one else." "Oh! my dear Love, I know. You want reality. So do I. What's between us will last for ever because it's founded on reality." reality love Agatha Christie
8e1843c I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair ... Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live--that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea... time reality fantasy shadow Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1215276 Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water. reality remember memory Sherwood Smith
45467f1 some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems. reality truth soap-opera tv problems movies Chuck Palahniuk
2fb1d2f In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was. reality compromise self-pity remorse regret memory Julian Barnes
5127910 I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air. reality sita disillusionment Christopher Pike
4ba4aaf Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. reality strength weakness Gene Wolfe
8bc2ae9 The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. dream reality living death life existing truths carpe-diem life-and-death dead dying Arundhati Roy
c4ddcdd That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes. reality science-fiction home Orson Scott Card
ec273b5 A book had always been a door to another world... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy. And that love could fill the real world with magic. reality life love inspirational kleypas Lisa Kleypas
4c05d63 It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there. lies reality realism despair Terry Pratchett
ed2ab37 The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore. reality Susanna Kaysen
149dcb0 Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. poets poetry writing reality writers creativity Julian Barnes
18ca08a "And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes." lover reality dreams love heads grounded clouds realist dreamers grass firm fall-in-love ideals purple illusions mountain worlds idealists sky dreaming feet V.C. Andrews
8537dbc You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life perfection reality Woody Allen
5456bd7 Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get... politics reality police Raymond Chandler
696b758 "Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head." humanity reality real-boy pinocchio Orson Scott Card
c887c01 When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud. But really, Marilla, the flying part glorious as long as it lasts...it's like soaring through a sunset. I think it almost pays for the thud. reality L.M. Montgomery
134d2e1 it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it. loss prayer reality grieving-mother Khaled Hosseini
6380a03 We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management? reality religion life truth meaning-of-life fact Tom Robbins
f1cde3b You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens. reality John Fowles
e0cf341 "Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina's center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm's length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out "picture" is clear and accurate. But is it?" -- reality perception eyes Leonard Mlodinow
aef4a9a But I still feel like I lost. We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet. probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else. reality love truth win Chuck Klosterman
f54acdd A mind is like a puzzle; you must unlock it to read its hidden secrets. mind reality life Melissa de la Cruz
ca819c7 If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality! reality Haruki Murakami
317b6d1 We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don't. People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments. reality life-lessons happiness perception perception-of-reality perceptions Stefan Zweig
aaf417a Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change death-and-dying fear reality death change fear-of-unknown changes fear-of-death Isabel Allende
203f665 Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope. reality happiness inspirational quotient Jodi Picoult
16c0fec The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world? time reality Jeanette Winterson
3f1380c We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. reality melena pregnancy child wicked mother Gregory Maguire
82454b8 At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? human-rights india equality women reality truth inspirational environmental-degradation false-gods narmada-valley dam government-corruption corporations nationalism economics government capitalism exploitation Arundhati Roy
6f2b966 But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me. reality dostoyevsky disillusionment maugham self hell Haruki Murakami
4cc730d I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality. reality love longing Orhan Pamuk
594e6e2 Where I'm living is not a storybook world. It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes. reality Haruki Murakami
6d472d8 You can lose a friend in springtime easier than any other season if you're too curious. reality friendship pessimistic wise Frances Hodgson Burnett
6a16b05 For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal. reality eddie stephen it pennywise nightmare king Stephen King
70e4d36 We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world. reality perception Stephen R. Covey
c2f8fb8 if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane. aaa woman rain reality life love hurricane qoute she John Green
1ada9af I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here. reality Bret Easton Ellis
66cf88a Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It's hard sometimes. integrity reality speaking-up speaking-out speaking choose honor voice Terry Tempest Williams
95bbdd0 The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality. reality life-lessons truth rational Robert Greene
a119c14 "Love is a fake!" Olson was blaring. "There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that's all!" reality insanity Richard Bachman
87160ea The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality. reality science Richard Dawkins
1b9e543 Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real? reality outside perspective Emma Donoghue
01dffc6 I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN. time reality Terry Pratchett
81917e2 "Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot. Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours." reality Chuck Palahniuk
859abae It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should. reality achievements electronics information thinking concentration Alain de Botton
4bf1df0 "Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. "Better get on with it," he said. "Make do with what there is." reality parallel-universe pragmatism Salman Rushdie
ad6bb37 The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history--the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen reality truth realist dreamer mistakes Robert Greene
5c47124 "How do I know you're not crazy?" she asks. "How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met?" "You'll have to test me out." "You have my info," she says. "I'll think about it." "Rain," I say. "That's not your real name." "Does it matter?" "Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real." "That's because you're a writer," she says. "That's because you make things up for a living." "And?" "And"-- she shrugs--"I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that." sanity lies writing reality truth socializing Bret Easton Ellis
9900e67 God, it's like reality's completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can't decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren't there for me anymore. meaning reality Tess Gerritsen
a0577a2 You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them. reality dreams Ursula K. Le Guin
d12b990 The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?...There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too--how I want to think I feel. reality naivete Chuck Klosterman
7c4eef2 What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering. travel reality Hermann Hesse
11a4ce5 What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means. reality philosophy Philip K. Dick
fa667b5 The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that -- as if that weren't enough -- but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know. reality Philip K. Dick
e9eb7d4 Imagination, like reality, has its limits. reality Tim O'Brien
1352c58 "We're all dreaming," Arctor said. If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day--his insanity--had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer." reality dreams dreaming insanity drugs Philip K. Dick
48c1aa7 But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want. reality Chris Bohjalian
e48f950 Sometimes big things happen, and they echo. Those echoes crash across worlds. They are the ripples in the fabric of things. Often they manifest as storms. Reality is a fragile thing, after all. reality worlds-end Neil Gaiman
edff35f The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. reality happiness simulation wants media Jean Baudrillard
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