“I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.”

— Rabih Alameddine, book Koolaids: The Art of War

Source: Koolaids: The Art of War

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is rea…" by Rabih Alameddine?

Rabih Alameddine photo

Rabih Alameddine14

Lebanese-American painter and writer. 1959

Related quotes

“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review (Spring 1961).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.”

Scott Westerfeld book Leviathan

Source: Leviathan

“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

"Helen's Exile" (1948)
Context: Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“I wonder if I am going crazy or if I do not love my family enough, or if it is the opposite, if I love them too much. If I am the only sane person I know.”

Philipp Meyer (1974) American writer

The Son (2013)

“Poetry interprets the chaos of human life and tries to bestow meaning on it. Without imagination there could be no poetry; and imagination chained by ideology produces only propaganda.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

“I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

“I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

Lawrence, Chua. "Michael Haneke" http://bombsite.com/issues/80/articles/2489, BOMB Magazine, Summer, 2002. Retrieved 29 July 2011.

“So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

“The very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.”

Susan Cain book Bittersweet

Bittersweet, Chapter 4 at pp. 92-93

Related topics