“Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that's what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas … that seem to have been with us from long before the stories of them happened. The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can't be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.”
The Moment Under the Moment (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), Foreword
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Russell Hoban 5
American British novelist, children's writer and illustrator 1925–2011Related quotes

“What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.”
Dr. Jonas Lear
Variant: I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to. What dark passages.
Source: The Passage Trilogy, The Passage (2010)

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Variant: That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Source: The Nameless City

“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
Variant: I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours.

“Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story”

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: All of us collectively are fumbling towards an apprehension of something that feels like a kind of group awareness – we are trying to feel the shape of it, it’s not here yet, and a lot of us are probably saying a lot of silly things. That’s understandable. There is something strange looming on the human horizon. If you draw a graph of all our consciousness, there is a point we seem to be heading towards. Our physics, our philosophy, our art, our literature – there is a kind of coherence there, it may look disorganised at first glance, but there is a fumbling towards a new way of apprehending of certain basic fundamentals.