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Reality Quotes
"Please don't be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she's a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I mean that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent."
19
"Because she looks to the sky so often, people think that her life is sweet, that her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars. But quite the opposite is true and I wish they could see- she looks up so much because all around her it's hard to see without breaking her heart. She once saw in a movie a window sign that said "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the stars." From that movie onwards, she decided to look up! Doesn't mean her life is sweet, doesn't mean her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars."
19
"Shakespeare, he thought as he scribbled away. "Foolish fancy. This is life as it is lived."
18
"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
18
"Whatever you acknowledgement gains the legitimacy to exist within your world."
18
"Nothing ever happens quickly (except when it does). Nothing is ever, ever easy (except when it is). And, most of all, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan (except in the movies)."
18
"Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification."
18
"The world is being created and destroyed in this very moment."
18
"It's all bullshit, folks and it's bad for ya."
18
"You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd."
18
"None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you're wearing-which are several years out of style if you're trying to reacclimatize yourself to the ways of your peers, and are not proper mourning shoes if you're trying to hold fast to your recent past-and not either one of us. 'Real' is a four-letter-word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof."
18
"My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine."
18
"How do you know if something is real? That's easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it give you wings? Does it give you roots? Does it make you look back at a month ago and say, "I am a whole different person right now? If yes, then it's real. The evidence of truth and reality, lies in how much something can touch you, can change you, even if it's from very far away. Distance is only the evidence of what can be surpassed."
18
"Straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist behaving as if it were not true."
18
"Good words - that triumphalism of positivity- but life will claw and eat you - chew you over and over - if you carry such a small knife ..."
17
"You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice " and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?"
17
"For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle."
17
"Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it."
17
"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality."
17
"She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries."
17
"Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
17
"Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature."
17
"Problems often become worse if incompetent people try to solve them."
17
"This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's the only real one."
17
"The amount of women you hear say, "If Donald-or Arthur-or whatever his name was-had only lived." And I sometimes think but if he had, he'd have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not."
17
"Don't cover up your sore with your wealth. Your wealth has limitations. At the Limit the sore will embarrassing by surface."
17
"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head."
17
"It is a part of probability that many improbabilities will happen."
17
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