c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In this stillness that is at the same time movement, in this darkness that is at the same time light, change is found not in the realm of ideas but in the energizing desire that is realized through precipitation. Desire tends towards its own realization and change takes place when the desire for it shatters the bounds of the possible, breaking the dialectical equilibrium holding together the framework of what is existent. It is at such moments that the imaginary flows into the real and overwhelms it, inundating it until it has been absorbed.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
You may be to call up the entire encyclopedia, but a brain with no heart and no reasoning .. well, nothing is more meaningless.
— Melissa de la Cruz, Masquerade
There is nothing like ‘within’ or ‘without.’ Both mean either the same thing or nothing.
— Ramana Maharshi
Two people can illustrate crudity to you.The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone.The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
— Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
They'll take everything, even your tears.
— George Foreman
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
— Stephen King, It
The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
— Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato
Either they're still naive, or stupid.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.
— Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.
— John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
— William James, The Correspondence of William James: 1885-1889
You can take a dog outside, but you can't make it pee
— Micah Amyx
What's the point of obsessing over cholesterol or bike helmets or even cigarettes when the biggest threats to our children are being released back into society every day? Yes, maybe 'some' of them have reformed, but what about the ones who haven't? Doesn't anyone realize that one 'touch', one 'time' will destroy a child's life ten times faster than a pack-a-day habit?
— Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.
— Alan W. Watts
Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!
— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
— Eugène Ionesco
To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.
— Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies and Why
The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.
— Machado de Assis
Human’s aren’t concerned with reality, merely their perceptions of it.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
— Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays
Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.
— Sarah Manguso
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it'll still kill you, but if you're a good navigator, at least you'll know where you were when you died.(In "The Nautical Chart" by Arturo Perez-Reverte)
— Justin Scott, The Shipkiller
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death. If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing!On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’. Events - tumours of time.Man secretes disaster.The secret of my adaptation to life? - I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts. Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.
— Emil M. Cioran
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
— John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism
...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.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I don't know what I need, or even what I want, from her or from anybody. There's no way to tell her the truth, because the truth is that my heart is broken, and I don't think there''s any chance of it being sewn back together. This is permanent. It can't be fixed.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
Obi-Wan Kenobi once said ‘your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.’ It seems to be getting harder. Distinguishing reality from the illusions people make for us, or the ones we make for ourselves. I don’t know, maybe that’s part of the plan, to make me think I’m crazy…it’s working.
— Huey Freeman
But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.
— Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden
What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
— Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Did she make you laugh? Did she love you as much as you loved her? Did she protect you and warm you and keep you from suffering? Valentine turned her eyes away from him, unable to face the empty answer in his face but not wanting to stop saying what she had thought for so long. "I saw how fascinating her mystery was to you. For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most-emptiness. A person full of life is never mysterious, on the contrary.
— Judith Krantz, Scruples
No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.
— Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm
You can love someone and not like spending time with them.
— Will Fetters, Memoirs
Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?
— Jesse Ball, The Curfew
To live by worry is to live against reality
— E. Stanley Jones
Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it
— Henry James, The Golden Bowl
Your mind builds your reality... based on anything you believe in.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.
— Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
life is a video game, only difference is that you don't always get three chances!
— Siddhartha Choudhary
Words don’t have the power to hurt you, unless that person meant more to you than you are willing to confess.
— Shannon L. Alder
It is ourselves we encounter whenever we invent fictions.
— Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Lost Art of Gratitude
So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?
— Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book
All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Latent brain functions can be enabled by force majeure when we are facing the weirdness of an unknown reality.
— Toba Beta
At last.. You only regret the chances you didn't take.
— Lovely Goyal, I Love the Way You Love Me
This is the real world, and only a believer walking in fellowship with His Creator and Redeemer can understand it. Everyone else is the world is experiencing a 'break with reality'.
— Jim Berg, Changed Into His Image
On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
There is nothing more real than what cannot be seen and there is nothing more certain than what cannot be heard.
— Confucius
Upset The Established Order Of Your Life And Everything Becomes Chaos...To A Degree That You Wont Be Able To Differentiate Between Mere Illusions And Solid Reality
— Sherif A. El-Mawardy, The Truth Behind Truth: What Lies Beyond...
Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.
— Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress
If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you can feel good. You would free yourself of all of that cumbersome impossibility of needing to control the world, or control your mate, or control your child. You are the only one who creates your reality. For no one else can think for you, no one else can do it. It is only you, every bit of it you.
— Esther Hicks
In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
— Alan W. Watts
If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.
— René Magritte
...but that was the thing about reality. It didn't need to make sense.
— Mira Grant, Blackout
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
— Jean Genet, The Balcony
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
— Arthur C. Clarke
Currently where you are is on a huge globe with a relatively thin crust of stone, containing fire in its bowels, rotating on its own slightly tilted axis at 1,000 miles per hour in an easterly direction while simultaneously traveling in orbit around an enormous ball of burning hydrogen, 93,000,000 miles away at 66,000 miles per hour. That’s 66,000 miles per hour, or nineteen miles per second, which is much faster that you’ve maybe ever imagined, and means that you will be traveling nearly 60,000,000 miles this coming year.Beauty is, you don’t have to imagine it, you can feel it instead. And if you want to know what it’s like, simply stop. Be still, and in that stillness, whatever you are feeling in your belly: that’s it. this is what it feels like to go 66,000 miles per hour while spinning at one thousand.
— Stephen Russell, Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior
If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
— Stephen King
Not all the magic of earth is benevolent.
— Alden Bell
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....
— Jean Genet, The Balcony
Reality is based on, and controlled by, our thoughts.
— Christine Rice
It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I could never really manage to tell reality and my dream world apart, for the two of them co-existed together as they slid over top of each other.
— Shvaugn Craig, The Suicide Garden and Other Stories
To be real is to be blessed.
— Kevin Zarbailov
The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that -- as if that weren't enough -- but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality.
— Clarence Day Jr.
The landscape looks different from every blade of grass.
— Marty Rubin
Think and then think what you have thought. Is it really what you had thought. Think again.
— Amit Abraham, Personality Development Through Positive Thinking
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
But that is what life is all about, he said. "It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination - and love.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect
The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.
— Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
My space chums think reality was once a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand. In my view, it’s absurdity dressed up in a three-piece business suit.
— Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
And it's his illusions about whatconstitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed
— Luke Rhinehart
The change of language is a change in reality.
— Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job
No escape--like life itself.
— Will Weaver
As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
it is what it is
— Hank Knabe
It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
How are you feeling, man?" he asks me."Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder."Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here."I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive."I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is.
— Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World
A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.
— Criss Jami, Healology
The clarity of perception makes reality look as it is.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
The natural world is the only reality, thus the only valid base for spirituality there is.
— David Petersen, On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
— Bertrand Russell
The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
The gap in the fire which had opened up before him, so that the twisted grimace on the face of existence had become visible through the play of the flames, narrowed to disappear completely. His back hurt and he could hear darkness breathing audibly.
— Paul Leppin, Blaugast : A Novel of Decline
Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.
— Jeffrey A. Lockwood
To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.
— Pablo Tusset, The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant
Virtual reality is a self-created form of chosen reality. Therefore it exists.
— Joan Lowery Nixon, Don't Scream
The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Aloneeverything changes.Some might call it distorted realitybut it's exactly the place I need to be.
— Ellen Hopkins, Crank
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
— Charles Baudelaire
Reality is inside the skull.
— George Orwell, 1984
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or surprises anyone, but this is where we are. If you want the outcome to be different, you will have to do something about it.
— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
The first stage of ignorance is illusion, due to lack of exposure to reality. The second stage of ignorance is delusion, or the refusal to acknowledge reality. The third stage of ignorance is the rejection of altruism.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd it’s only what nothing else is.The fact that it’s it separates it from every other thing.(Everything’s nothing without another thing that’s not it).
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Only our imagination has the power to create the world you want and whatever gives you true joy. Beware of those who tell you to face reality and let go of your imagination. All they may truly ask for is that you shift your imagination from what you want to what they want.
— Franco Santoro
I had great pity on Ansje, because she always acted very happy, but I believed that it was really a front. I could see through it. Inside she was crying because she was really very sad. You pity people like that -- the ones who try to lie to themselves -- because they suffer so much and don't face reality.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately the author of this fragment will again be Ed—but even this is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: "Trapped? Masturbate!
— Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
— Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry.
— Elizabeth Berg, The Pull of The Moon
Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known
— Oscar Wilde
I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
The undiscovered is not far away. It’s not something to be found eventually. It is contained within what is right in front of us. The essence of reality is being born right now. It has never existed before. Reality is constant creation and destruction, and in this constant change is something unborn and undying, something that cannot be approached through the known or the past. It isn’t seen through striving to become something based on ideals stemming from former experiences. It comes to that which is being, not striving. In this state of being in the moment, without the known, without knowing at all, with neither past nor future, is a space that is not filled with time. And in this space, the undiscovered and ever-changing moment exists—a moment containing all possibilities, the totality of existence, absolute reality. Reality is now, and in the now, we can experience the true nature of the universe and the universal mind.
— H.E. Davey
You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I’ve been watching people talk and thinking that all my life. And maybe it means there’s something awful the matter with me, but it’s true.
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. "Better get on with it," he said. "Make do with what there is.
— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, but some, to dream.
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Realities disguised as symbols are, for me, new realities that are immeasurably preferable. I make an effort to take them at their word. To grasp, to carry out the diktat of images to the letter.
— Claude Cahun
Why would our brains have this capacity to sense the oneness of the universe, a sense that can be induced in many ways, even technological, if that capacity did not reflect an external reality?
— Kara Dalkey, Firebirds Soaring: An Anthology of Original Speculative Fiction
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Universal emptiness is mere concept.The fact is, there was never emptiness.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
success is easy with just a prayer, encouragement and patience!
— Sonia Dea Octalia
As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he's bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. I was just pretty and gay. You don't ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair
—  you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon.
Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.
— Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Reality is not static—its properties are in constant flux, so perhaps we are as much in the world as we can ever be, and that's the problem.
— Renee Gladman, The Activist
Lies have always been easier to invent than reality.
— Marty Rubin
According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations.
— Cruce Stark, The Haunted Dusk
In reality the universe has no geometry.
— Kedar Joshi, Superultramodern Science And Philosophy
I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.
— Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing
...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
— J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Good fiction doesn’t claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice—the way we all know things should be—without suggesting that’s how things really are. Good fiction is the mirage that declares itself a mirage, yet compels us to faith through its beauty. Good fiction is the dream that’s too good to be true, so perfect and symmetrical that it gives itself away every time. But it doesn’t trick you into suspending your disbelief by trying to look anything like reality. Good fiction makes you acutely, painfully aware of your disbelief, and makes you believe anyway. And when it’s done well—when it’s done right—good fiction is more real than reality.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
Life has to go on...............
— Ruby
To rule out the possibility of belief in another's reality is to encapsulate that reality and, thus, to impose implicity the hegemony of one's own view of the world.
— Katherine P. Ewing
In a reality known as the garden of beautiful eden, Adam is dreaming about his sinful children on earth.He is struggling to wake up from a terrible nightmare.
— Toba Beta
Jokes are hilarious only when you take them unreal and dreamlike, otherwise it becomes painful. So I always live otherworldly...
— Saket Assertive
The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.
— Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays
Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality we can hold - intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally - and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality.Civilization also has a limited perception of Infinite Reality. And with a haughty self-assurance, it imposes that perception on us until we think it is our own.
— Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
The ultimate aim of reality is to become science fiction!
— Eli Of Kittim, The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days
We all live partially in reality and partially in a world of make-believe.
— Marty Rubin
And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.
— Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World
Well, what's reality, then? Is it what I think or what other people think?
— Edward Averett, Cameron and the Girls
Your reality is not my reality.
— Edward Averett, Cameron and the Girls
Poverty is a curse. Don't call it. It takes few generations to come out from the curse of poverty.
— Nazmul Ahmed Noyon
Sometimes regardless of what we want, reality takes over.
— Kasie West, Lucky in Love
Tell the truth. It's your duty to do so. It's up to them how they take in the information. Keep it real.
— J.R. Rim
People underestimate the impact of a new reality.
— Joe Incandella
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.
— Jim Butcher, The Aeronaut's Windlass
When you’ve been given a curse of perspective you don’t stop to consider the gift of oversight that most humans have been bestowed with.
— Saim .A. Cheeda
I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a "nature" with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be "normal" (exempt from love)..."—from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_
— Roland Barthes
Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
— Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong.
— Jane Austen, MANSFIELD PARK By Jane Austen (illustrated) Original Version: 1814 (illustrated) Original Version By Jane Austen
If you keep seeing events and others through your existing lens you would miss out on the new possibility. Sometimes, reality!!!
— Harrish Sairaman
I've been a fugitive from reality since forever.
— Roxanne Bland
Your belief about others creates an unconscious behavior pattern in you which creates the reality!
— Harrish Sairaman
Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
We accept the reality of the world in which we are presented.
— Andrew Niccol, Peter Weir
We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.
— Andrew Niccol, Peter Weir
Sitting by the windowI was thinkingWhat changed so fastlyMe or the city...
— Irfa Rahat
All our prayers can't keep a single leaf from falling.
— Marty Rubin
This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's the only real one.
— Marty Rubin
Reality is a construct of chemicals.
— Abhijit Naskar, 7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All
Logic can't explain the salmon swimming upstream. So it denies the existence of salmon.
— Marty Rubin
It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not.To never feel completely alone even when you are.
— Julia Walton, Words on Bathroom Walls
All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.
— Moonshine Noire
Being a visionary is a blessing and a curse, you're blessed to see things other people are not able to see but you are cursed to sit in it alone
— David Banner
By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void.
— Democritus
But when you’re a kid, it isn’t chaos. It’s just a heartbeat. Your house isn’t floating through space, it sits on the ground. Once you get old enough you start to see that color is just paint and doors are just wood. Then, at some point, that feeling of home vanishes entirely. And… that’s what I fear. That nothing will ever make me feel like I’m safe again. That once you leave home, you never get it back.
— Ryan Galloway, Biome
They call what we went through a problem, an experience, a dream… but we know that it’s much more than that.
— Emory R. Frie, Wonderland
Maybe Jess was caught up with these ridiculous, impossible ideas because it meant she never had to try for something real.
— C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick
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.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Relationship can end never really began.
— James Hew
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I live by four simple words. Love. Being. Here. Now.
— Todd Crawshaw, Heretofore
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.
— Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
Life is all about Expectations verses Reality, be in reality.
— Bharath Mamidoju
Every morning there are flowers of potentials. Your thoughts and interactions give them shape and reality.
— Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity
...they would say 'he said this, he did that', but they would never say 'she said this, she did that'. So I would say, they are sick, and I am well. Pardon me.
— Charles Bukowski
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 definitestate—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.
— Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos