Quotes about reality
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“She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.”

Isabel Allende book Eva Luna

Source: Eva Luna

Life, Color, Idea

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Beauty, Parting

“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

Robert Greene book The 50th Law

Source: The 50th Law

Life, Beauty

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."”

Sigmund Freud book The Future of an Illusion

Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927)

Religion, Question

“Looks like it's time to liven up this dead little town!" - Saint Dane (The Reality Bug)”

D.J. MacHale book The Reality Bug

Source: The Reality Bug

Time, Dead

“Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: 1Q84 BOOK 1

Fools, Appearance

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Chapter 1 ("The Psycho-Epistemology of Art")
Source: The Fountainhead

Art

“Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.”

Romain Gary (1914–1980) French writer and diplomat

Literature

“The human mind had a remarkable ability both to discount what it sees and make reality conform to expectation.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Warrior Heir

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Author's Note, p. xi
Source: Life of Pi (2001)

Dreams, Imagination, Support

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Life, Dreams, Hope, Soul

“Look. If I touch you with this hand, I can remember touching you, but I can't prove I ever did. If reality is nothing more than what is in our mind… then what is the difference between this world and a dream?”

Kaori Ozaki (1976) Japanese mangaka

Source: Immortal Rain, Vol. 1

World, Dreams

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Fear, Imagination

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Feeling, Change, Past, Future

“Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

Source: Reflected in You

Pain

“Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Love

“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Dreams, Dependency

“Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.”

Terry Goodkind book Soul of the Fire

Source: Soul of the Fire

Effort

“When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Living Buddha, Living Christ

“I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love, World, Dreams

“The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Time

“Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Dreams, Feeling

“Virtual reality has nothing on Calvin.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Dreams

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Truth, History

“Screw reality. It don’t feed my dog. It don’t make my Porsche payments. It don’t get me laid. Bullshit does that…and I like it that way. (Leo)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dark Side of the Moon

Dogs, Way

“We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

Understanding, Knowledge, Learning

“Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Men, Star, Future

“Is willing to accept that she creates her own reality except for some of the parts where she can't help but wonder what the hell she was thinking”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Hell, Thinking, Help, Parting

“He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.”

Scott Westerfeld book Goliath

Variant: ... that was what kept the world interesting... reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.
Source: Goliath

“We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.”

Philip Yancey (1949) American writer

Source: Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud

Life, God, Health, Disappointment

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Life

“The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book Middlesex

Source: Middlesex

Dreams, Way

“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Sense

“How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?”

Lisa See book Peony in Love

Source: Peony in Love

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

Ted Chiang (1967) American science fiction writer

Question, Nature, Thinking, Science

“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.”

Joe Queenan (1950) American writer

Source: One for the Books

Books, Disappointment, Reading

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

World, Dreams

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

People, Dead

“They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.”

James Frey Bright Shiny Morning

Source: Bright Shiny Morning

Dreams, Distant

“You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Source: The Japanese Lover

Life, Happiness, Waiting

“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

World

“In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

Happiness

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Variant: Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Sea

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Time

“In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Dreams, Hurt

“That is the beauty of memory, isn’t it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. (Mnimi)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Truth, Beauty, Memory

“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

People, Pleasure, Youth, Sadness

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

Women, Men, Hope, Art

“Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Dreams

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Alfred Stieglitz, as quoted in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, M. Orvell (1989). p. 220
Variant: There is a reality — so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. That's what I'm trying to get down in photography.

“No matter how people try to dispute it, perception is reality. Its what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

People, Personality

“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“… reality, the name we give to the common experience.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

“I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Fear, Universe

“I think reality is overrated.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Thinking

“People make their own reality, goddess. We hate and we love for reasons that are known only to us.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Styxx

Love, Hate, People

“Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”

Joe Haldeman book The Forever War

Source: The Forever War (1974), Chapter 10 (p. 46)
Context: Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

Study

“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 book The Road

Source: The Road

Game, Memory

“Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

“Know that ever about you stands the reality of love, and each moment you have the power to transform your world by what you have learned.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: One

Love, World, Learning

“Love can conquer everything but reality.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Variant: Love can conquer everything but reality. Which will win every stinking time.
Source: Lover Unleashed

Love

“I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

Business, Fight

“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become reality.”

Earl Nightingale (1921–1989) American motivational speaker

“Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?"
"No. They only say that I'm good in the sack."
"They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them.”

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) American crime writer

“A book had always been a door to another world… a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.

And that love could fill the real world with magic.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Scandal in Spring

Love, Life, Books, World

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Sense, Freedom

“Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view.”

Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987) Tibetan Buddhist lama and writer

Source: The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Book IV, ch. 11
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Love, Happiness, World

“I see you brought along your violent little girlfriend. What a nice surprise!" - Saint Dane (The Reality Bug)”

D.J. MacHale (1955) American television director and producer

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

Attributed to an interview on Larry King Live; also quoted in Quotable Quotes (1997) edited by Deborah Deford
Attributed variant: The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron:
Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)
1990s

Sense

“Every time my dreams threaten to become reality, something always happens and I end up alone.”

Jane Green (1968) British writer

Source: Swapping Lives

Dreams, Time