Quotes about Reality

What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

I remember a television program I once saw; a rerun, made years before. I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.

It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn't how it was going to be for me.

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time.

Sometimes he gets high, on the pot that circulates as freely as cigarettes did once. He thinks he should be enjoying this experience more than he actually does.

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I'll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.