Quotes about Reality

reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.' 'A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,' said the Savage promptly. 'Quite so…

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not.