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7e4f181 The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind. reality taste-test thin-slicing Malcolm Gladwell
2b8071f Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience. fairy-tales magic reality science Anne Morrow Lindbergh
bf0dad4 You don't question Providence. If you can't have the reality, a dream is just as good. providence reality Ray Bradbury
8b14404 Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying. reality Terry Pratchett
c09427f "Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.... Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence--some supernatural realm--you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, "To Hell with argument, I have faith." That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason. Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that's all." reality Leonard Peikoff
ce0d791 The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos [words]. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong. reality reason reliance society truth Anthony Burgess
4cf862d Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true. reality George Bernard Shaw
6b7cdaa Insanity is the ability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there. reality Paulo Coelho
103bb0d Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital... Doubt is like dye. Once is spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain. hope reality Jodi Picoult
409ef9d Mostly you are what they think you are. reality Neil Gaiman
89c86f3 We must set aside our wishes and give heed to reality. Nobody can accept the truth while hiding from it. When a decision matters, we have to stare at the truth unflinchingly. Only then can we find peace in our choices. reality truth Brandon Mull
275d2a9 Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them. reality truth Oscar Wilde
2285a7f Art--the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory. meaning meaning-of-life pain reality Lawrence Durrell
646ac94 "She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all." love reality Edith Wharton
913b17f Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality. reality value Henning Mankell
78d2b45 Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? meaning reality Fyodor Dostoyevsky
e2bbfae It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition. love reality Julian Barnes
97d84a9 That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does. life-lesson reality thekiterunner Khaled Hosseini
ef8a1ee A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind! reality writing Joseph Conrad
9abef4d I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. reality thinking Marilynne Robinson
9e8dcb6 Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination. consciousness predictive-coding reality Michael Pollan
e5ff5ec Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real. reality Terry Pratchett
5f9bad7 And if the word means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. america integration love race-relations reality united-states us usa whites James Baldwin
f232ace Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back. reality television Michael Crichton
b1f46f4 Harsh justice is still justice. justice-system justification reality George R.R. Martin
a9efeb0 I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind. reality Haruki Murakami
9ec904f A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements. fiction life literature plan plot plot-device real-life reality Marisha Pessl
13955e4 Some women just aren't cut out to be mothers, and unfortunately it had taken Susanna three kids to realize she was one of them. logan mothers reality susanna Kelley Armstrong
4e2bec8 There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones. bad choice choices decide decision evil good reality truth worse worst Robin Hobb
81bfb6a "Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word" genius reality william-blake writing Brenda Ueland
e142c18 "Odysseus draped the towel over his shoulders and stretched his back. "You remember practicing with wooden swords? All the moves, the blocks, the counters, getting your footwork right, learning how to be in balance always?" "Of course you were a hard master." "And you recall the first time you went into a real fight, with blood being shed and the fear of death in the air?" "I do" "The moves are the same, but the difference is wider than the Great Green. Love is like that, Helikaon. You can spend time with a whore and laugh and know great pleasure. But when love strikes--- ah, the difference is awesome. You will find more joy in the touch of a hand or the sight of a smile than you could ever experience in a hundred nights of passion with anyone else. The sky will be more blue, the sun more bright. Ah, I am missing my Penelope tonight" reality realization true-love David Gemmell
dbcacf3 Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities. reality Gene Wolfe
7b2fdb8 I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally off. caleb reality self-awareness-honesty-self Simone Elkeles
8b5f1ce The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important? reality truth Hermann Hesse
23e006c It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry. manhood reality Elizabeth Berg
5fa06fb ...because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153) reality Jack Kerouac
b55657e I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner. reality Anthony Bourdain
1cf7eee If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does. artist perception reality Tom Robbins
5e4bcb1 You beg fate to make your fears into reality, Aleran. But for the moment, they are only fears. They may come. If so, then face them and overcome them. Until then, pay them no mind. You have enough to think on. fate fears jim-butcher reality Jim Butcher
d25a01a I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but this is where we are. If you want the outcome to be different, you will have to do something about it. reality Sheryl Sandberg
edaf28e Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use. The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. living reality science suffering tools words Richard Dawkins
cb9058b The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality. flee flight haruki-murakami imagination imagine japan japanese murakami reality the-wind-up-bird-chronicle Haruki Murakami
f35b232 ""It always seemed somehow less real here... a really detailed dream, but sort of washed out, like a thin watercolor. Softer, somehow, even with their electric light and engines and everything. I guess it was because there was hardly any magic." longing real-world reality Garth Nix
c86c31b It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces. aspirations bitterness disappointments hope life reality alain de botton
38d949b It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions. reality self Frank Kermode
aa9d91b Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again. reality sadness John Green
0207569 Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant... past reality Alan Lightman
7e8567a I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis. reality wishful-thinking David Sedaris
e5fe81a The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic pain reality Edith Wharton
82fd6a1 You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home. life reality truth Chuck Palahniuk
ad3bda3 While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights. ender humans kids life love reality truth Orson Scott Card
e72601a What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers' barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not? landscape reality seeing spirituality Annie Dillard
1f58dda I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath. illusion perception perspectives prejudice reality Kahlil Gibran
7f097ed I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together. reality Fernando Pessoa
5821f89 When a man showed up you didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at yours, because it's painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it may be, or you could relax and lose yourself. decision-making inspirational life reality truth Ken Kesey
b798f19 I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar. inspirational lies reality truth words Roger Zelazny
f0cb4b4 I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ... ('Adopted-orphan smile', I mean, that's not bad, come on.) compulsive-lying crazy-bitch ego egotistical fantasy liar lie lies out-of-touch-with-reality pretending reality self-righteous smile smiling superiority-complex vain vainity wannabe wannabewriter writer writing Gillian Flynn
4ae92b2 There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the most inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious. life reality realization Nicholas Sparks
4f5d07e I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out. john-steinbeck reality reason science the-winter-of-our-discontent John Steinbeck
f340a18 Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do! reality work-ethic Henry James
d639c2d I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness. madness reality Adolfo Bioy Casares
47ce40e "I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... It was the feeling that the great, deadly pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me - and the great voice of millions chanting, "Shame. Shame. Shame." It's society's way of dealing with someone different." reality society Ken Kesey
8281c4d What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods? reality Dan Simmons
7b3bd72 His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life. reality Dan Simmons
7fdcde6 I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. imagination reality Eugène Ionesco
0ae7433 Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it -- fragmentary and uncertain though it is -- that distinguishes man from all other animals human-being past present reality Colin Wilson
179bbfd I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. goodness life people reality self-awareness James Baldwin
d565e35 Dream are different than real life but important too. real-life reality Audrey Niffenegger
df236a8 My daddy said that the first time you fall in love, it changes you forever and no matter how hard you try, the feeling just never goes away. nicholas-sparks reality Nicholas Sparks
3c73742 You may be to call up the entire encyclopedia, but a brain with no heart and no reasoning .. well, nothing is more meaningless. life reality reasoning Melissa de la Cruz
94a7a16 I don't know what understanding myself is. I don't look inside. I don't believe I exist behind myself. clarity existence feeling meaning-of-life nature paganism pantheism personae personality reality seeing self understanding Alberto Caeiro
36d367c When you're in the middle of a nightmare, something ordinary is the only hope. Anyway, ordinary things are the best. I've always thought so. hope life reality Agatha Christie
b7c6684 Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained--something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know; desire expectations impossible insane reality thought Fyodor Dostoyevsky
475a2c5 To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real? novel reading reality Orhan Pamuk
b90f08e it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them). reality simulation unmasking Jean Baudrillard
c4ceedd I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life? delusion delusional delusional-love frustration grief hope hopeless hunger loner loss misery obsession past reality relationship save sickness stalking unreal unrequited-love waste Donna Tartt
8016d31 Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend -- movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people. film films gender-stereotypes movies reality stereotypes Chuck Klosterman
50d70d6 But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it. letting-go life moving-on optimism reality waiting world Lois Lowry
fd168b0 "You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination." "A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting." "You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right." reality truth Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
a10c676 Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal. reality time Tahir Shah
24dcd6b Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions. reality Jodi Picoult
5a426c4 Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest. reality unimaginable Milan Kundera
7e093c0 "Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience--but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry." now physics reality time time-passing Paul Davies
8c16c1b A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process. experience flow languages leadership life mystery persuasion problem process reality team understanding Frank Herbert
5ec2e21 Everything is the way it is because we've all agreed that's the way it is. reality Charles de Lint
930afe5 It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn't it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn't playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules. childhood children fantasies fantastic fantasy game games playing playing-games pretend pretending reality Francesca Lia Block
c27d3c4 But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand. dreams hero hopes reality symbol truth Ralph Ellison
d91a705 It could all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise. reality scepticism virtual-reality Iain M. Banks
f5f9f94 You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced. reality Graham Greene
9a006ec What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? life protagonist reality Julian Barnes
a762a40 Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it. page-81 parenting parents reality religion Jonathan Franzen
ffc82d1 Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so. reality Alexander McCall Smith
260df3d For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep. reality recovery sleep Diana Gabaldon
744e5d5 "How are you feeling, man?" he asks me. "Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder. "Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here." I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive. "I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is." assurance brothers confidence drug-trip drugs reality Michael Cunningham
1d9d350 The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful family-contact pain reality relationships writing Monica Ali
dc0c55a "A real man--real in all the ways that we recognize as real--finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world--the real world--will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive. The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no "real" danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world. Is the man's behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of ethics." -- cowardice ethics reality Stephen R. Donaldson
4a4c65a Everything's different from us. That's why everything exists. being clarity existence god life love meaning paganism pantheism reality seeing truth universe Alberto Caeiro
c237b8c "But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love." life reality Mary Balogh
a431018 I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams. art dreams reality Azar Nafisi
42a9b13 "The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer's day, was that it had not been long ago since I had known everything. I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. "Is that how it is for you? I asked. "Is what how it is for me?" "Do you still know everything, all the time?" ...She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars." reality spiritual universe Neil Gaiman
ac0bf44 Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. map reality simulation territory Jean Baudrillard
ede3996 For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh. reality sex-addiction Chuck Palahniuk
c2ff5cc "On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities." reality war Ursula K. Le Guin
f62aa0e The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. artists ideas life poets reality walden Henry David Thoreau
e854603 Spirituality isn't some quaint stepchild of an intelligent worldview, or the only option for those of us not smart enough to understand the facts of the real world. Spirituality reflects the most sophisticated mindset, and the most powerful force available for the transformation of human suffering. belief-system beliefs conscious-living facing-facts faith forces-of-nature healing-abuse healing-the-emotional-self healing-the-past healing-trauma human-suffering intellectualism intelligent intelligent-people mindset outlook-on-the-world overcoming-adversity-quotes power-of-love power-of-thoughts real-world realism reality smart-people sophisticated spiritual-living spiritual-quotes spiritual-wisdom spirituality stepchild suffering suffering-of-humanity worldview worldview-quotes Marianne Williamson
22ed5b0 None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself. reality Christopher Priest
eaca0ad The world is a cancer eating itself away... I am think that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. chaos henry-miller music reality reality-of-life silence time tropic-of-cancer Henry Miller
420640c Real people are made out of a whole lot of things--flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words. fictional-characters literature reality words Thomas C. Foster
2ae14a3 Adventuring turned out to be boring. Zach thought back to all the fantasy books he'd read where a team of questers traveled overland, and realized a few things. First he'd pictured himself with a loyal steed that would have done most of the walking, so he hadn't anticipated the blister forming on his left heel or the tiny pebble that seemed to have worked its way under his sock, so that even when he stripped off his sneaker he couldn't find it. He hadn't thought about how hot the sun would be either. When he put together his bunch of provisions, he never thought about bringing sunblock. Aragorn never wore sunblock. Taran never wore sunblock. Percy never wore sunblock. But despite all that precedent for going without, he was pretty sure his nose would be lobster-red the next time he looked in the mirror. He was thirsty, too, something that happened a lot in books, but his dry throat bothered him more than it had ever seemed to bother any character. And, unlike in books where random brigands and monsters jumped out just when things got unbearably dull, there was nothing to fight except for the clouds of gnats, several of which Zach was pretty sure he'd accidentally swallowed. fantasy humorous reality Holly Black
3851b75 ...you can pretend that bad things will never happen. But life's a lot easier if you realize and admit that sometimes they do. challenges difficulty downfall experiences life pain reality Lois Lowry
7b3d2a9 Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. capture change fade fled flower history hold-on past preserve reality remember time write writing Robin Hobb
e2df306 Reality does not go away when it is ignored. reality Thomas Sowell
5be3309 ...the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent... merleau-ponty probable reality Maurice Merleau-Ponty
b424b22 I'll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me. reality Charlotte Brontë
d2cc4e3 What's life? A frenzied, blurry haze. What's life? Not anything it seems. A shadow. Fiction filling reams. All we possess on earth means nil, For life's a dream, think what you will, And even all our dreams are dreams. illusion reality Pedro Calderón de la Barca
fd254b1 I wonder how much the general population of this country know that the legal system has far more to do with playing a good hand of poker than it does with justice. justice justice-system legal-system life reality reality-of-life Jodi Picoult
21c1156 I realize that humans cannot bear very much reality. Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad'Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him! reality religion selfhood Frank Herbert
b81af89 We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid. reality reconciliation uncertainty uncertainty-in-life Philip K. Dick
99dadea Civilisation consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities. reality Fernando Pessoa
6713f34 The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. power production reality society wants Jean Baudrillard
2d56167 El misterio de la vida no es problema que hay que resolver, sino una realidad que hay que experimentar. dune existence existencial life realidad reality science-fiction vida Frank Herbert
f9628bf That living has no value - it's what you do with life that gives it worth. reality Michael J. Sullivan
d74f07b People want us, or want us dead, because of what we are, not who we are. It's hard. final james james-patterson lessons-of-life life maximum patterson reality reality-sucks ride the warning James Patterson
2c1d60b "Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water...I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called 'France'". I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes." -- dreams history memory nature reality Annie Dillard
03dcdd5 She was always left feeling like a murderer. Because the messenger becomes the murderer. Until the fatal words are spoken, the loved one concerned is still alive, waking, sleeping, going about his business, making telephone calls, writing letters, going for walks, breathing, seeing. It was the telling that killed. death reality Rosamunde Pilcher
7d45e39 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. growth innocence metamorphosis painful reality transformation wept woman Anaïs Nin
a1fa054 He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new. reality rebirth dystopian dystopian-fiction escape-from-reality fahrenheit-451 fiction ray-bradbury Ray Bradbury
0ac11a2 "Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences--red spot, green spot--smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book , philosopher points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?" now phi-phenomenon psychology reality time time-passing Paul Davies
0e1b739 "Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water...I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called 'France'". I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes." dreams history memory nature reality Annie Dillard
e2c7154 Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?... Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening... Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? perspective reality Annie Dillard
380d7a4 God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world. reality Nadia Bolz-Weber
ffc6396 Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced. fact reality Jane Smiley
eab234b For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be. myth reality Julian Barnes
cd7bbc2 Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away? health reality wonder A.M. Homes
bd8bb6f "I don't understand," says Gerald, alone in his third- class carriage, "how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time." And yet they do." reality E. Nesbit
34890ac He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them...They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers. purity reality Ray Bradbury
020b854 There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up. reality unreality Jeanette Winterson
c6fa9ce "It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors")" imagination rationality reality unreality Richard Matheson
a24dcb7 It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. media medium reality revolution truth Jean Baudrillard
2c42f82 The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure. danger internet physicality reality truth web Margaret Atwood
8e0f010 "Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269" freedom passions reality reason Irvin D. Yalom
e39927b When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music ithout regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslims it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. radio reality Hermann Hesse
6b7d7d2 Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout. combed devout gifts jesus judea poor raiment reality sleek spotless unintelligent unreal unwise H.G. Wells
435ed0d Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? illusion reality truth Donna Tartt
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