c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
Because an illusion is an illusion. Reality always exists despite the facade.
— Kasie West, Pivot Point
The imaginary is what tends to become real.
— André Breton
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.
— Young-Ha Kim, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
— Alan Moore
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Normal is an ideal. But it’s not reality. Reality is brutal, it’s beautiful, it’s every shade between black and white, and it’s magical. Yes, magical. Because every now and then, it turns nothing into something.
— Tara Kelly, Harmonic Feedback
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
— George Orwell, 1984
Real dishes break. That's how you know they're real.
— Marty Rubin
Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
— Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Reality is like a fruitcake
—  pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.
The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine]
— Kresley Cole, Kiss of a Demon King
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.
— Lao Tzu
The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.
— William S. Burroughs
If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.
— Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
— Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
— Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
— Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
— M.C. Escher
If it looks real and feels real, do you think it matters if it's real?
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.
— Sherwood Smith, Crown Duel
If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own.
— Melissa de la Cruz, Lost in Time
Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
— Jane Wagner
Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
I am real. This”–he put his other hand over the first-“is real. You see me interacting with other people all day long, don’t you? I talk to people; I affect things in the world. I cause things to happen. I am real.”“But-but what if this whole place”-I had to suck in air again-“what if everything is inside my head? East Shoal and Scarlet and this bridge and you-what if you’re not real because nothing is real?”“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it.
— Kyōichi Katayama
It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
People reject what they do not understand because it makes them feel small. They would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)
— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.
— Tonya Hurley, Homecoming
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
— André Breton
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Shoving feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
— Brad Pitt
I have a subconscious list of rules for how reality should work. I did not develop these rules on purpose, and most of them don’t make sense – which is disturbing when you consider that they are an attempt to govern the behavior of reality – but they exist, and they play a large role in determining how I react to the things that happen to me. Large enough that a majority of the feelings I feel are simply a reaction to reality not complying with my arbitrary set of rules. Reality doesn’t give a shit about my rules, and this upsets me.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
— Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
You get what you give. What you put into things is what you get out of them.
— Jennifer Lopez
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Oh God just look at me now... one night opens words and utters pain... I cannot begin to explain to you... this... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it?I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty...these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things...If I told you what was really in my head, you''d never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive.
— Emily Andrews, The Finer Points of Becoming Machine
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.
— Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw
When someone is drowning and you try to save them, they're more likely to drown you before you pull them out.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Styxx
Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?
— Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
And I realized that some things just don't work that way. Life isn't a fairy tail. And the person you fall in love with doesn't always love you back. But that's ok, because at the very least it makes you stronger. And brings you to a place where you can fall in love with yourself. And that to me is more important than finding someone that only makes you complete when they are around, It's really about Finding the person that will teach you ALL the lessons you need to know ...so that you feel complete all by yourself. 
— Bethany Brookbank, Write like no one is reading
Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me— I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.
— Vladimir Nabokov
At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman's wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools in working my way through our social obligations. I believed that playing the roles of wife and mother were the least I could do to help support Tom's career.During the day, I was a puzzle with innumerable pieces. One piece made my family a nourishing breakfast. Another piece ferried the kids to school and to soccer practice. A third piece managed to trip to the grocery store. There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer.I was a circus performer traversing the tightwire, and I could fall off into a vortex devoid of reality at any moment. There was, and had been for a very long time, an intense sense of despair. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better. I lived in an emotional black hole.p20-21, talking about dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder).
— Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
— Niels Bohr
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real
— Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings
All you really have...is now.
— Laura Wiess, How It Ends
Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven't realized that todayis tomorrow's nostalgia.
— Zeena Schreck
Sometimes when you're upset it's so easy to forget what's real and go for what makes you feel better. (131)
— Charise Mericle Harper, Flashcards of My Life
To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.
— Avital Ronell
it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.
— Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
As though sensing her heightening alarm, Pinfeathers halted his advance."I can’t help it that I’m susceptible to you," he whispered. "You know that. It’s just that you’re so...unreal...and so I have to touch you. If only to be certain that I’m not the one who’s dreaming. You see, I hear that sort of thing is going around.
— Kelly Creagh, Enshadowed
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
— Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
People wears a mask of lie so they look attractive , so be careful
— Muhammad Saqib
That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Choice
Life is tough, then you die.
— George Carlin
I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.
— Christopher Pike, The Last Vampire
It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.
— Susan Douglas, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women
Even if you fulfill your hearts desire, by sacrificing something important, you may not necessarily be happy. Happiness doesn’t come in one form, it determined by your own heart.
— Ai Yazawa
it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
— André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor
Oftentimes in reality, the genius is in the position of the antihero. Neither the good guys nor the bad guys really trust him because his truth is universal.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.
— Todd Strasser
There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
— Hermann Hesse
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?
— Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
— Alan W. Watts
We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.
— David Eagleman
If we knew everything would change we would have turned back but we didn't know. Thats how things happen. Especially sunny days hide dark moments in their pockets.
— Karen Foxlee, The Anatomy of Wings
In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.
— Scarlett Thomas, Going Out
Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life. The key for the betterment and completeness of modern living is education. But, ' Man cannot live by bread alone '. Man, after all, is also composed of intellect and soul. Therefore, education in general, and higher education in particular, must aim to provide, beyond the physical, food for the intellect and soul. That education which ignores man's intrinsic nature, and neglects his intellect and reasoning power can not be considered true education.
— Haile Selassie I
People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.
— Neil Gaiman
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal. For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. 
— Edward Said
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
The more my dream are fulfilled the quicklier they become realities losing their shine.
— Ai Yazawa
What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.
— Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers
Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
— Max Ernst
If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
To us, reality is just raw footage: Unclear. Desultory. Too shocking or not quite shocking enough. It’s ironic that making something more real involves making it less real, but Gideon always says people don’t want real. They want the idea of real, which involves production.
— Paula Stokes, Vicarious
The waking have one world in common
—  sleepers have each a private world of his own.
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
— David Gemmell, Lord of the Silver Bow
Writers don't just create pages in a novel, but depth to worlds that become a safe haven for those who wish to escape the reality of their own.
— T.J. Mihaila
In order to survive in a world of instinct,its' alternative is to hunt or being hunted.Reject this, then be prepared to be hunted.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
there isn't a slightest wound that doesn't hurt in the heart.
— Sandra Pulido
The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It's called self-observation.
— Anthony de Mello, Awareness: Conversations with the Masters
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
When your past shows up to haunt you, make sure it comes after supper so it doesn't ruin your whole day.
— Jay Wickre
It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.
— Jean Lorrain
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.
— Luigi Pirandello
In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.
— Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
— Terence McKenna
Is this the reality you wanted?
— Jonghyun
Its oke to be sad. I've been trained to love my darkness
— Lady Gaga
Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.
— Dean Koontz, The Good Guy
Non fiction? Non fiction?! Listen, reality is what got me into this mess in the first place.
— Justin Alcala
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Reality is just a dream dreamed by everyone
— Fola, The Seed
As I was sitting in my chair,I knew the bottom wasn't there,Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,Ignoring little things like that.
— Hughes Mearns
Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance.
— Isaac Watts
My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before.
— Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic
It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night.  At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.  Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.
— Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.
— E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion
I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.
— Christine Stockton, Sluts
It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.
— Vincent van Gogh
It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown.Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world.If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.
— Isaac Babel
Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be.
— Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen
You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.
— Warren Buffett
Life made you get your hands dirty
—  life was vengeful if you tried an easy route.
Doffing the ego'ssafe glory, he findshis naked reality.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
— Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw
Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.
— Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
Luckily, however, life doesn't always follow tradition, but craves out a path of its own.
— Kader Abdolah, Het huis van de moskee
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.
— George Bernard Shaw, Candida
I wondered if that's what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody every got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn't have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die.
— Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain
All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.
— Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
The illusion is reality. The only contradiction is the observer.
— Lionel Suggs
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Only other people can make you feel real.
— Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.
— Dan Simmons, Drood
Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?
— Paul     Murray
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
— W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado
Beliefs create reality
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency
Many realities hidden behind wall of perception.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.
— Marc Maron, Attempting Normal
Perception and reality are two different things.
— Tom Cruise
Do you really believe that the moon isn’t there when nobody looks?
— Albert Einstein
I’d like to have enough time and quietTo think about absolutely nothing,To not ever feel myself living,To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
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.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
— William James
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.
— Kelley Armstrong, Birthright
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.
— Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary.
— Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60.-Jack Nicholson
— Jack Nicholson
Believe reality is what you were taught was myth.
— Nicholas A. McGirr, The Growing Dim Project
What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
— Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services.It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really , as they say, the enjoyment of new things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Clocks
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
— Herbert Stein, What I Think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life
At Garvin High we were dealt a hard dose of reality this year. People hate. That's our reality. People hate and are hated and carry grudges and want punishments ... I don't know if it's possible to take hate away from people. Not even people like us, who've seen firsthand what hate can do. We're all hurting. We're all going to be hurting for a long time. And we, probably more than anyone else out there, will be searching for a new reality every day. A better one ... But in order to change reality you have to be willing to listen and to learn. And to hear. To actually hear.
— Jennifer Brown, Hate List
And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own.
— Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
I leaned against my door, struggling to catch my breath, and thought that maybe hell wasn't a place at all, but a thing. A contagious thing. A thing that could creep up the steps, seep through the crack under my door, grow horns and sprout fire - smelling faintly like sulfur. A thing that could sink its tendrils inside and take root, coloring everything gray and distorting a smile into a sneer. And while i got dressed for the play, swatted at my back and kept running my hands over my stomach because I could feel it, I swear, I could feel it reaching for me, trying to grab hold.
— Megan Miranda, Fracture
Reality is what people who lack vision see.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
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.
— Michael Crichton, Airframe
What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
— Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
— George Orwell
I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
— Jacobus Johannes Leeuw
The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.
— Laurence Gonzales
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
— Virginia Woolf
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
Mostly you are what they think you are.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy.
— Bo Lozoff
There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.
— John Crowley, Little, Big
Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
— Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.
— John Grisham, The Rainmaker
A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
— Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Harsh justice is still justice.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.
— André Breton