Reality Quotes

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

We used to do coke, till Just Say No put the stuff out of reach. Now it's crank. Meth. The monster. It's a bitch on the body, but damn do you fly.

~ Ellen Hopkins

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

Because an illusion is an illusion. Reality always exists despite the facade.

~ Kasie West

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

~ André Breton

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

~ Philip K. Dick

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

~ Victor Hugo

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

~ Young-Ha Kim

A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

~ Wallace Stevens

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

~ George Orwell

Real dishes break. That's how you know they're real.

~ Marty Rubin

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

~ Alan Moore

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

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

~ Eugene O'neill

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

The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.

~ Michel Houellebecq

Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine]

~ Kresley Cole

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

~ Jeanette Winterson

Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.

~ Lao Tzu

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

~ William S. Burroughs

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

~ Criss Jami

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

~ Charles Baxter

When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

~ Margery Williams Bianco

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

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

~ Jeff Vandermeer

If it looks real and feels real, do you think it matters if it's real?

~ Daniel Nayeri

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

If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own.

~ Melissa De La Cruz

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

~ Jane Wagner

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

I am real. This”–he put his other hand over the first-“is real. You see me interacting with other people all day long, don’t you? I talk to people; I affect things in the world. I cause things to happen. I am real.”“But-but what if this whole place”-I had to suck in air again-“what if everything is inside my head? East Shoal and Scarlet and this bridge and you-what if you’re not real because nothing is real?”“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?

~ Francesca Zappia

I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it.

~ Kyōichi Katayama

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

~ Terry Pratchett

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

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky