Reality Quotes

“Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“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, Pretties

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”
― HP Lovecraft

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick, Silence

“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to watch where you were going?” he teased.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to put your things away so that people didn’t trip over them?” she quickly fired back, irritated that he found the entire situation amusing. “And while we are talking, I truly need to know. Do you ever wear clothes?”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“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, Midnight’s Children

“What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Oh, sorry, love. I was just getting out of the shower when I heard this loud commotion in front of my door.” Jake gave her a sloppy grin. “I didn’t realize there was a dress code when coming to the aid of a beautiful neighbor. I’ll keep it in mind for the next time I come running.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

{Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal}”
― Rachel Carson

“When the river of emotions bursts its banks and expectations go over the edges of reality, the brain creates hallucinations. Ringxiety-stricken people feel illusive vibrating alerts and hear phantom phone rings, since absence of ringing generates scaring emptiness and destroys their self-esteem. ("Kein Schwein ruft mich an" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life. The key for the betterment and completeness of modern living is education. But, ' Man cannot live by bread alone '. Man, after all, is also composed of intellect and soul. Therefore, education in general, and higher education in particular, must aim to provide, beyond the physical, food for the intellect and soul. That education which ignores man's intrinsic nature, and neglects his intellect and reasoning power can not be considered true education.”
― Haile Selassie I

“Reality is not what we see, reality is what we think we see.”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People live on the flow of the daily reality and they surge on the waves of hazy expectations. They can experience pleasant junctures and try to catch and enjoy each special moment that is offered to them. Until life takes them by surprise.”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People reject what they do not understand because it makes them feel small. They would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is what makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.”
― Mike Norton

“When the brain becomes too tired, the mind stops decrypting the perceptions in our mental world and surrenders willingly to the unguarded moments of life.
For some time, the safeguards of our thinking pattern weaken and discontinue the decoding of the chips of daily reality.
The mind picks the instants which are above suspicion, pure and innocent. ("Uber alle Gipfeln ist Ruh" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“Definitions and meanings change all the time. Truth and reality are very volatile, indefinite, multi layered and sometimes very paradoxical. That’s why it is very fiddly to make a set definition for the phenomena of our daily life. ( " Did not expect it would ever happen, there" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner

“Normal is an ideal. But it’s not reality. Reality is brutal, it’s beautiful, it’s every shade between black and white, and it’s magical. Yes, magical. Because every now and then, it turns nothing into something.”
― Tara Kelly, Harmonic Feedback

“Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”
― Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

“You couldn't hide from bad things and pretend they didn't exist–that left you with a dream world, and dream worlds eventually crumbled. You had to face the truth. And then decide what you wanted.”
― Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly

“If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic