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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. reality truth medium revolution media Jean Baudrillard
d399514 "Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which "collapses" the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality." reality observation Michio Kaku
fed7012 ...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic--just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences--without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel. reality truth revelation stories Salman Rushdie
b33a883 The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy. pain memories joy reality inspirational past-and-present memory pleasure Orson Scott Card
c5a1fc0 " is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed--or, to make the analogy closer, that is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?" time reality scientific-method spacetime time-passing Paul Davies
592543f "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." This touches on the heart of the argumentum ad populum fallacy. Physical reality does not require belief to sustain it, and belief will not modify the rules of the universe." -- philip-k-dick reality Armin Navabi
ff0c5c7 Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.... reality science spacetime rocks geology Ursula K. Le Guin
fcbbbbd "It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds' public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own discomfort. 'Peter Freyd is my brother, Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and sister-in-law,' he explained. Peter and Pamela had grown up together as step-siblings. 'There is no doubt in my mind that there was severe abuse in the home of Peter and Pam, while they were raising their daughters,' he wrote. He challenged Peter Freyd's claims that he had been misunderstood, that he merely had a 'ribald' sense of humour. 'Those of us who had to endure it, remember it as abusive at best and viciously sadistic at worst.' He added that, in his view, 'The False memory Syndrome Foundation is designed to deny a reality that Peter and Pam have spent most of their lives trying to escape.' He felt that there is no such thing as a false memory syndrome.' Criticising the media for its uncritical embrace of the Freyds' campaign, he cautioned: lies story influence reality truth bias biased child-abuse child-rape enabling-abuse fabrication false-memory fmsf freyd jennifer-freyd objective paedophile pamela-freyd peter-freyd protecting-pedophiles sadistic sex-abuse underwager flawed pedophile denial deny siblings media surprise child-sexual-abuse incest false-memory-syndrome-foundation psychology Judith Jones Beatrix Campbell
5566b3a Good news didn't seem real until you'd told at least a dozen friends. reality Chuck Palahniuk
148b164 This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. reality life Philip Gourevitch
e0861ab ...it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is. reality Norton Juster
fbf232d They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were. reality William Maxwell
65b0769 "Last night I thought about all that kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed. "It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over." "Let me alone," said Mildred. "I didn't do anything." "Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were bothered? About something important, about something real?" time world books reality work life bother kerosene lifetime reality-check observation real important create ignorance destruction thought creativity creation Ray Bradbury
f9056bf How disquieting to realise that reality is an illusion, at best a democratisation of perception based on participant consensus. reality perception Irvin D. Yalom
418b16f We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem. reality other-people trauma Patrick McGrath
fc27ae4 With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy. reality hope life truth lie Fernando Pessoa
d444711 We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality. reality truth Tim LaHaye
93c502d People want us, or want us dead, because of what we are, not who we are. It's hard. ~Angel warning reality life james-patterson maximum patterson reality-sucks the james lessons-of-life ride final James Patterson
409547d Fair and unfair are for children reality life-lessons maturity fairness Michelle Lovric
aea7d46 If memory is unreliable, if the past and the present can simply change without warning, then fact and truth will cease to exist. How do we live in a world like that? reality truth memory Blake Crouch
7347608 "Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately." reality fantasy encapulsation Ursula K. Le Guin
1ad53c7 You can't choose your childhood, it's just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that's really what (makes you). choice reality Kim Stanley Robinson
83ec159 Fiction is really often much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and it comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing factual, psychological, and moral understanding. reality Ursula K. Le Guin
09229c7 It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare. reality Donna Tartt
07c589a I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio. war reality Tim O'Brien
a0e5a96 Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. progress reality Matt Ridley
a967aa7 A man may beg, but a woman has to sell. reality Victor Hugo
aef864d their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be reality Donna Tartt
cb6d00b "Even more remote from his way of thinking, even more impossible than any other thought, would have been words such as this: "Is it only I alone who have created this experience, or is it objective reality? Does the Master have the same feelings as I, or would mine amuse him? Are my thoughts new, unique, my own, or have the Master and many before him experienced and thought exactly the same?" No, for him there were no such analyses and differentiations. Everything was reality, was steeped in reality, full of it as bread dough is of yeast." unity reality subjectivity Hermann Hesse
eb2448d Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? reality Kate Atkinson
7bc0daf Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation. racism equality reality race-relations James Baldwin
8d5ece0 The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. fiction writing reality Bret Easton Ellis
741bdc8 "A fresh dream-fresh happiness! A fresh rush of delicate, voluptuous poison! What is real life to him ! To his corrupted eyes we live, you and I, Nastenka, so torpidly, slowly, insipidly; in his eyes we are all so dissatisfied with our fate, so exhausted by our life"! And, truly, see how at first sight everything is cold, morose, as though ill-humoured among us. . . . Poor things! thinks our dreamer. And it is no wonder that he thinks it! Look at these magic phantasms, which so enchantingly, so whimsically, so carelessly and freely group before him in such a magic, animated picture, in which the most prominent figure in the foreground is of course himself, our dreamer, in his precious person." romance reality dreams Fyodor Dostoyevsky
e003dda Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence. reality perception expectations Don DeLillo
68dd5dd To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. reality having simulation Jean Baudrillard
e49c8a4 Why did everyone like that story so much when it wasn't true? Why was everyone so eager to believe it? Was it because, in real life, ever after's generally stink? romance reality fantasy love truth fairytale façades made-up happy-ever-after Margaret Peterson Haddix
cb0351b "Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse. Consider the biography of any "self-made" man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments." politics reality Sam Harris
072ab11 A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it's over. Be pleasant but don't smile too much; be sad but don't overdo it or the family will feel worse than they already do. Be hopeful but don't let your optimism be taken as a lack of empathy or an inability to deal with the reality. Because if anybody was to be truly honest there would be a lot of arguments, finger-pointing, tears, snot, and screaming. sympathy empathy reality honesty optimism life funerals society Cecelia Ahern
4fb0cd2 "There is in certain ancient things a trace Of some dim essence -- More than form or weight; A tenuous aether, indeterminate, Yet linked with all the laws of time and space. A faint, veiled sign of continuities That outward eyes can never quite descry; universe reality truth H.P. Lovecraft
90869f1 Concerning this a man once said:Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost. struggle reality parables Franz Kafka
27301c5 By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water. reality truth too-much-affection too-much-of-a-good-thing what-you-love regret obsession Jonathan Lethem
d0ccc97 "People have been sleeping and/or marrying their way to the top since the first cavewoman said: 'Ugh, that one's the strongest and has the biggest club. I'll shake my mastodon-skin-covered ass at him.'" "Ugh?" "Or whatever cave people said. And it's not just women who do it. Cave guy goes: 'Ugh, that one catches the most fish, I'll be dragging her off to my cave now.' Ava sees Tommy and--" "Says ugh." "Or today's equivalent thereof." -Eve & Roarke. ." marriage reality in-death roarke hilarious J.D. Robb
b468eee It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. reality mindfulness Mark Nepo
e14446e Insane people -- psychologically defined, not legally define -- are not in touch with reality. reality Philip K. Dick
aaaa064 "It from bit. It's an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is in the information stored within them. But this information sprang into existence when the universe observed itself. He draws a circular diagram, representing the history of the universe. At the beginning of the universe, it sprang into being because it was observed. This means that "it" (matter in the universe) sprang into existence when information ("bit") of the universe was observed. He calls this the "participatory universe"--the idea that the universe adapts to us in the same way that we adapt to the universe, that our very presence makes the universe possible." reality it-from-bit-theory participatory-universe Michio Kaku
4df18fe "I glare at him and sigh. "Don't you understand what a book is?" "Obviously." emmahart reading romance quote reality life love standalone novel Emma Hart
857e3f9 Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe--with charity--that there is still room for Hope. history christianity reality religion hope parousia charity catholicism christian Umberto Eco
ccabae9 What may be most terrifying is just how real reality television is, after all. We say we watch these shows to feel better about ourselves, to have that reassurance that we are not that desperate. We are not that green. But perhaps we watch these shows because in the green girls interrupted, we see more than anything, the plainest selections of ourselves, garishly exposed but unfettered. reality green-girl self-reflection Roxane Gay
3718d15 Folks love fantasy. Beasts the shit outta reality and day of the week. reality folks shit Garth Ennis
fb23b63 "This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America's "art." Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it." reality the-mississippi mark-twain art John Kennedy Toole
53c0e6a Faculty X is the ability to grasp the reality not simply of other times and places, but of the present moment as well. present reality x places Colin Wilson
c54758d ..moments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. mind spirit faith reality music love on-being hymns pantheism christian church mystery Krista Tippett
240edf0 Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. time reality Raymond E. Feist
20f0071 The speed felt tremendous. And the bottom of the ravine was treacherous. She ought to control her mount somehow - slow it; steer it to safer footing. Of course. And while she was at it, she ought to defeat the Alend Monarch's army, take care of Master Gilbur and the arch-Imager Vagel, and produce peace on earth. While composing great music with her free hand. Instead of doing all that, however, she concentrated with a pure white intensity that resembled terror on simply staying in the saddle irony reality sarcasm Stephen R. Donaldson
0a6c984 No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness? sanity reality rationality Rebecca Goldstein
f08796c " "The things we see," said Pistorius gently, "are the things which are already in us. There is no reality beyond what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives; they take pictures outside themselves for the real ones and fail to express their own world. One can of course live contentedly enough in that situation. But once you know about the other you no longer have the choice of following the majority way. The way of the majority, Sinclair, is easy, ours is hard....But now we must go." " reality emil-sinclair pistorius Hermann Hesse
3e2d5af "Thomas, says there are no real dragons. Only they are in your head, he says." "Thomas is right, my love, so do not be afraid of the dark." "But they are in my head sometimes, so I guess they are real." fear reality imagination Karen Harper
c54d884 Consciousness determines existence. existence reality Michio Kaku
463ed64 But if I make an observation, what is to determine which state I am in? This means that someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function. existence reality wave-function Michio Kaku
3d61410 "To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state--that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence." reality observation Michio Kaku
35e30f9 I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical. reality Bruce Chatwin
2d1ed3d "Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep." "You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane. "I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime." "It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea." "Ah," said Harry." writing reality dreams love like-life lorrie-moore wet loved plays springtime sloppy Lorrie Moore
e5fdb30 Reality is for those who cannot face their dream. reality symptom psychoanalysis Slavoj Žižek
d93cb59 Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions - our idea of reality - are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses. reality senses Blake Crouch
b1e8f12 Is deja vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality? time memories reality science-fictionce timelines time-travel Blake Crouch
15df115 I don't know about you but I find I want to resist Buber here. Because personally I am pretty attached to my own feelings (and the complex, fascinating personality they imply). But even if I can't accept Buber totally here, I do find him a useful correction to some of my worse instincts. Looking at my life through a Buber lens, for example, I see that it is quite possible that my feelings, as strong as they may be, may disclose no more of reality to me than is afforded by the outline of my own self-image. This is useful knowledge. Every day I am confronted by situations in which I must judge the reality or otherwise of a situation by way of my feelings about it (this is especially acute in marital arguments). But just because I feel something very strongly, does this make it true? Isn't it possible that in may cases where my feelings are strong I may indeed be to all those delusional girls in the Bieber signing queue, who have so many feelings for him, after all, so very many sincere, deep, excruciating feelings, which are, of course, what define their identity, what makes of each of them ... feelings reality buber i-it i-thou Zadie Smith
e3c4a23 The dead live in our memories. live memories reality life ghosts Pete Hautman
aa79b59 He was aware that in thus relegating to irrelity a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the lossof the sense of free will. He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream, creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was being, perhaps the void was better. He would accept the monsters and the necessities beyond reason. He wouldgo home, and take no drugs, but sleep, and dream what dreams might come. reality science-fiction Ursula K. Le Guin
59846d7 As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation. responsibility freedom reality truth duties duty emancipation end obligation outcome responsibilities sever ties release Robin Hobb
0ef26c6 Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as time goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow will all come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be. struggle time pain reality death life truth tomorrow strive balance body believe belief health decline effort fight Robin Hobb
c429027 we live in different worlds, different realities world reality different-worlds parallel-universes Pete Hautman
5d70777 Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false. story reality the-sea-the-sea iris-murdoch the-past meta memory Iris Murdoch
3b637e7 When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. [...] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication. reality philosophy truth critical-examination depiction critical-thinking marketing logic speech Harry G. Frankfurt
6e9ca0c Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there's an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. 'Now that I have found Truth,' he said, 'what shall I tell them at the palace about you?' The wizened old creature smiled. 'Tell them,' she said, 'tell them that I am young and beautiful. reality truth Shashi Tharoor
a1572e4 When you're young--when I was young--you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. literature youth reality life passionate the-sense-of-an-ending julian-barnes emotions young Julian Barnes
dbe5231 "These poor souls. These poor pathetic souls." The Emperor gestured toward the passersby. "I don't understand," Tommy said. "Their time has passed and they don't know what to do. They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions." "They have really nice shoes," Tommy said. "They have to look right or their peers will turn on them like starving dogs. They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating." metaphor reality humor happiness emperor-of-san-francisco shoes Christopher Moore
de70453 The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously. theory reality Iain M. Banks
1e49912 "Perche finche la guerra e altrove, non riesci a prenderla sul serio. Come ha detto Martha Gellhorn "La guerra e un fatto personale". E proprio cosi: finche non capita a te, non riesci a capirla, tanto meno a immaginarla. Finche non entra nella tua vita e irreale" war reality Lucy Foley
9f47a79 is reality simply a dream we share? people reality family paul-hautman Pete Hautman
71fe207 Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open. I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision. reality principle Joyce Carol Oates
8ad4b63 "- "Do You know what ghosts are, Stuey? I'll tell you. They're secrets haunting the memories of the living. So long as we carry their secrets, they refuse to leave. They wait." "Wait for what?" "To be forgotten. My father has been gone for sixty years, but" -- he tapped the side of his head -- "he's still here. He never left." reality forgotten-memories ghosts-of-the-past ghosts secrets Pete Hautman
7cfb885 Sounds like you're trying to say that creation of new alternate worlds is a conscious decision.' 'I'm not trying to say it - I just said it. reality spirituality spiritual creation alternate-worlds create-your-future create-your-life deliberate-creation manifestation Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
02d81dc There is but one reality, that is true -- but the two of you experience it in slightly different ways. The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is very much a looking glass, Miss Lancaster. reality multiple-realities perception perception-of-reality Jim Butcher
de117c2 "The President called it the "Epitome of the American dream." Daddy called it the "unholy alliance of business and government." But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources--more profit. The answer to my parents' dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I've been sleeping longer than I've been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It's a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn't possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I've only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I'm in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I've tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I'm sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I'm mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there's something wrong. I shouldn't be so aware. But then I realize I'm only aware for a moment, and then, as I'm realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that's because I didn't want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don't like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I'm too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I've already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it's too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn't matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I've just been lying here in frozen sleep." time earth reality dreams amy-martin beth-revis centuries atu-series Beth Revis
f9e8572 I must assume that knowing is better than not know, venturing better than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit. I take with deep seriousness Thomas Hardy's words, 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst. reality truth practicality psychotherapy self-improvement Irvin D. Yalom
c74586d figuring out was is real isn't always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories reality stories Pete Hautman
ef727a9 They're memories reality lessons-in-life Lois Lowry
6ff8bee el humano no es fruto de la perfeccion, sino de una enfermedad humanity reality historical-romance-fiction spain Manuel Rivas
9756e16 Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way. myth meaning reality mythology Karen Armstrong
63b2899 It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon. reality pleasures lives A.S. Byatt
0c852d6 For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan. politics reality zero-sum-game paranoia Roger Scruton
8294dc8 "Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside of What would happen then? I wonder what my sister, who understand books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She's so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she'd say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children - books like that short story by Garcia Marquez, "Light is Like Water," and of course - are nothing but desperate attempts by adults to come to terms with childhood. That although they may seem to be stories about children's worlds - worlds without adults - they are in fact stories about children's worlds - worlds without adults - they are in fact stores about an adult's world when there are children in it, about the way that children's imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected by other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures." reality imagination children Valeria Luiselli
e47f400 What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brain stops working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called 'heaven' where there is no pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There's no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever. Sorry. reality life Ernest Cline
d0a4d51 Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. lies reality truth memory Jeanette Winterson
37c8f57 Boeken zijn de beste middelen - prive, discreet, betrouwbaar - om over de werkelijkheid heen te stappen. reality Jhumpa Lahiri
9526c63 Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can't bear the chill of reality. And don't exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you're no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful. reality religion Irvin D. Yalom
1d035c6 Sometimes when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over reality the-secret-history surreal Donna Tartt
ac370d1 "When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen - that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface - gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm - walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. light reality truth impressions shadows Steve Erickson
e80d956 I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise? Henceforth, I would have to address things as they are, not as I imagine them, for this was a new version of reality. reality perception John Banville
6948b6e "We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country," Morrie sighed. "Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning tings is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it-and have it repeated to us-over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is to fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore." reality perspective Mitch Albom
35d05ac The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions. lies fiction reality dreams ersatz jonathan-lethem Jonathan Lethem
7b1ceda But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real. reality Christopher Isherwood
a589e90 "The philosophical implications of "predictive coding" are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories." reality perception Michael Pollan
ff4bbb4 It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach. reality maddness atoms molecules black power James S.A. Corey
e2d6e3b I think maybe they come out into the grounds in nightwear. But no, in typical anorexic stype they have read the fashion magazines literally. This is their version of thin girls in strappy clothes. The girl in the petticoat talks to me, as Emma has done on occsasion, in a rather grand style, as if she is a 'lady' of some substance and I a visiting guest. Do they chat much about clothes? I ask Emma in the car. She shakes her head. So, does she, Emma, see the difference between underwear or nightwear and 'going out' clothes? 'Yes,' she says, her voices strained again. 'But it's one of the things you don't know properly when you're ill and confused. You see these pictures and the people in the magazines are real for you. reality fashion-magazine anorexia-nervosa anorexic mental-illness Carol Lee
a487826 I know the difference between the confection of live as sung in a minstrel's tale and the sustaining bread of love in reality, he defended himself. Both are to be savoured in their own way. reality love Elizabeth Chadwick
ce59c1f It is only a metaphor--or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events. metaphor reality the-only-story julian-barnes memory Julian Barnes
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