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Reality Quotes
"You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real."
2
"Oh, "Tanstaafl." Means "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." And isn't,' I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, 'or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless."
2
"The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real."
2
"My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is that young sloths are so inept they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers, feeling like death, and doing things to prove they can be done—all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky."
2
"Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care...Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who at lucky! As for the other men, stagnant night is upon them."
2
"War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know."
2
"For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief-it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page-"Child's Body Found in Wood."
2
"A bitter reality of truth can be wisely told in a sweet tale of lullaby."
2
"No matter what you do, 10% of the population will not like you."
2
"Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times?"
2
"Our personal experiences and mental reasoning skills establish the range of our perception of reality. Our physical and mental abilities determine the outer perimeter regarding what we can experience and learn. Our inaugurating dreams are unlimited by physical reality and our genetic composition. There will always be an unbridgeable rift between countless combinations of human dreams and the infinity of reality, unless we accept what we are without wishing to be something else."
2
"We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day."
2
"Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it."
2
"Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank."
2
"We can't have what we want and nothing is gonna change it."
2
"In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood."
2
"She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception."
2
"Problems often become worse if incompetent people try to solve them."
2
"He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts."
2
"The universe has no mind and that's why it can never reach perfection! Perfection is the art of meticulous high-mind!"
2
"For a moment, the cardboard sets come crashing down to reveal that squalling monster, reality, locked up in the confines of its man-made cage. It is a fearsome thing, beautiful, inherent only to itself. Faced with such naked, existential truths, I understand why humans worship flesh-eating monsters and bloodthirsty gods.But only for a moment."
2
"Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner."
2
"We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable."
2
"The real world is oftentimes different from what you expect it to be, what you think it to be, and what people might say it to be."
2
"Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt."
2
"But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat."
2
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