Quotes about reality
page 9

“But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story…”

David Clement-Davies book The Sight

Source: The Sight

Life

“Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Life

“Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Life, Waiting

“In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Life, Confidence

“Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

“Doctor I've wrestled with reality for 40 years and I'm happy to say that I've finally won out over it.”

Mary Chase Harvey

Source: Harvey

Happiness

“But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Feeling, Selfishness

“at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 80.
Context: Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Heart, Sad

“One of the saddest realities is that we never know when our lives are at their peak. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago.”

Jonathan Carroll (1949) novelist, short story writer

“In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Up, Simba
Essays
Variant: There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Context: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Home

“Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

“there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Thinking

“When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

World

“You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

People, Democracy, Idea, Freedom

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Source: My Life on the Road

Life, Way, Heart

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

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: Reflections on War and Death

Pain, Pleasure

“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”

Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright

Saturday Review (4 May 1966)

Truth

“Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Dreams, Color, Painting

“Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“… the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: A Perfect Blood

Time

“Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.”

C. Terry Warner American writer

Source: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

Truth, Thinking, Learning

“… reality is always plural and mutable.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

“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 book Crown Duel

Source: Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

Water, Memory, Time

“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 book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Question, Past

“Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.”

Gary Paulsen book Hatchet

Source: Hatchet

Imagination

“Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Wherever You Are, Enlightenment Is There (page127)
Not Always So, practicing the true spirit of Zen (2002)

Perfection

“Reality - Dreams = Animal Being
Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)
Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)
Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living

Wisdom, Dreams, Heart, Animals

“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

Life

“Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it….”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

As "Trudy"
Contributions of Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)

“I believe that we form our own lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

“I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.”

Charles Bukowski book Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories

Source: Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories

“We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy.”

Joshua Ferris Then We Came to the End

Source: Then We Came to the End

Love, Way, Search, Business

“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Source: Les Fleurs du Mal

Feeling, Help

“I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

-Claude Frollo”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Dreams

“It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

“Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel

Women, Peace, Thinking

“I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

Thinking, Light

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Life, World

“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

“- "What is reality?"
- "One of the many possible illusions.”

Robert Sheckley Options

Source: Options

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Love, Sense, Anger

“Reality is what you can get away with.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Reality is What You Can Get Away with

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Life, Pain, Disappointment

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

“Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It?

“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

As quoted in Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author : A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland (1972) by Virginia Haviland
Context: I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

Children, Way

“Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Night

“With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future… all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Future, Perfection

“That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Way

“We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Life, World, Universe

“Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Sense, Parting

“Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality.

-Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt”

Judith McNaught book Whitney, My Love

Source: Whitney, My Love

Dreams, Memory, Childhood

“‎"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

People

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Soul, Time

“That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Nature

“The smaller your reality, the more convinced you are that you know everything.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Source: My Big TOE - The Complete Trilogy

“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 (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Life

“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”

Maggie O'Farrell (1972) British writer

Source: After You'd Gone

Life, Feeling, Reading

“My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Source: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

World, Justice

“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

Source: Nobody Knows My Name

“one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Dreams, Feeling, Soul

“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Pleasure, Fear

“My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless romantic obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Life, Hope, Way

“Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow; Peter could. The latter befriended the impostor within; the former raged against him.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Rage

“People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Love, People

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

Henri Bergson book Time and Free Will

Source: Time and Free Will

Dreams, Hope, Idea, Future

“The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.”

Jean Shepherd (1921–1999) American writer and radio host

Way, Time

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”

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

People, Idea, Loneliness

“My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Source: Madness: A Bipolar Life

“Sooner or later, reality does occor and when it does, all the lies show up, like blood on snow.”

Andrew Clements Things That Are

Source: Things That Are

“This is my sin for giving in to my own weaknesses. My heart just couldn't keep up with the gigantic gap between dreams and reality. -Jellal Fernandes”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

Dreams, Heart

“Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Context: ... she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."

People, Imagination

“There’s no remaking reality… Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.”

Philip Roth book Everyman

Source: Everyman

Way

“Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.”

Harlan Coben book Caught

Source: Caught

World, Way, Thinking, Universe

“Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: 1Q84 BOOK 1

“I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

“Fantasy love is much better than Reality Love.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Love

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

“Katniss, got that spile?" Finnick asks, snapping me back to reality.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Learning

“Reality isn't what it used to be.”

Dean Koontz book The Taking

Source: The Taking

“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Tear, Summer, Night

“I have come here to thank personally each Member of the Congress who labored so long and so valiantly to make this occasion come true today, and to make this bill a reality. I cannot mention all their names, for it would take much too long, but my gratitude; and that of this Nation; belongs to the 89th Congress. We are indebted, too, to the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to the support given to this measure by the then Attorney General and now Senator, Robert F. Kennedy. In the final days of consideration, this bill had no more able champion than the present Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, who, with New York's own "Manny" Celler, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Congressman Feighan of Ohio, and Senator Mansfield and Senator Dirksen constituting the leadership of the Senate, and Senator Javits, helped to guide this bill to passage, along with the help of the Members sitting in front of me today.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)

Support, Help, Personality, Gratitude

“Bangladesh is heavily invested in advertising itself to Americans and other potential trading partners as a "moderate Muslim country."… Over the last few decades, however, they have come more and more under the thumb of radical jihadis. Yet, they have not stopped trying to portray themselves as what they perhaps were at one point, and few Americans know that the reality is not what they are saying it is.”

Richard Benkin American journalist

Benkin, Richard L. (2012). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus. New Delhi: Akshaya Prakashan. p.300.

Country

“The most pertinent fact about the new state of things after Constantine and Augustine is not that Christians were no longer persecuted and began to be privileged, nor that emperors built churches and presided over ecumenical deliberations about the Trinity; what matters is that the two visible realities, church and world, were fused. There is no longer anything to call "world"; state, economy, art, rhetoric, superstition, and war have all been baptized.”

Constantinianism Policies

John Howard Yoder, "The Otherness of the Church" (1961) in A Reader in Ecclesiology (2012), p. 200

War, World, Art

“In reality, the universe is neutral about our existence. Only dogs care.”

John Twelve Hawks book Spark

Spark (2014)

Dogs, Universe

“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life, War, People, Books

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)

Life, World, Feeling, Universe