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Reality Quotes
"A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world."
24
"The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are."
24
"It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved."
23
"Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect."
23
"No matter how ugly a fruit is, worms will seek it out."
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"There is cost for everything."
22
"You cannot change reality by ignoring it."
22
"Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are."
22
"Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine-some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone-but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him."
22
"For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it."
21
"And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn't matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one's fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won't change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point."
21
"We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers."
21
"As to the other three, if they had been perfection they would not have been real girls, and you could not have wept over their trials and laughed over their pleasures."
21
"Not for the first time I find our lives are a shadow, and I am not afraid to say that people who think they have everything figured out and are masters of logic - they are responsible for the greatest folly. No human being is happy. Strike it rich and you are luckier than your neighbor - but happy, never."
21
"The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught."
21
"A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen."
21
"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations."
21
"The most brutal avenger on earth is a reality you ignored, however minor."
20
"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."
20
"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."
20
"Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable."
19
"Whatever you don't completely reject outright is taken as acceptance by reality."
19
"I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats."
19
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A."
19
"You can't be in my world...You live in this one."
19
"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."
19
"Gifts - that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands."
19
"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."
19
"Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it does not exist."
19
"People who think nothing can go wrong are usually disappointed."
19
"I kept returning to this new and bizarre question: is there anything that actually is as it seems? Is anything perceptually straightforward? Maybe that's inherently impossible, because impressions are, by their very nature, cumulative " the sum of all your interactions with and perceptions of things."
19
"They want to see their expectation... Entertainment has nothing to do reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality."
19
"Then she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think 'this must be heaven'. Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain - which started a fraction of a second later - was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain - unique, unmistakable."
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