ignoring reality Quotes

“I soon found out this much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”

“After dinner the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know...Occasionally, on those nights when we were all reading together, a train would thunder by, shaking the house and rattling the windows. The noise was thunderous, but after we’d been there a while, we didn’t even hear it.”

“Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here.”

“I was a little excited but mostly blorft. ‘Blorft’ is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.”

“Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

“I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

“Some towns … want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue.”

“I guess a fake life inside a cartoon is a lot better than his real life . . . So I draw cartoons to make him happy, to give him other worlds to live inside.”

“Numb the dark and you numb the light.”

“You’d be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are.”

“The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

“Honestly, I just wanted to take it easy for the rest of the day. I didn’t want to hear Spoony preach about how hard it is to be black, or my father preach about how young people lack pride and integrity, making us easy targets.”

“Even if they didn’t know Rashad . . . they couldn’t just ignore what happened to him; they couldn’t walk away. They were probably afraid, too.”

“Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the ‘erasing’ of people, the ‘hiding away’ of suffering.’”

“Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

“I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.”

“I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away . . . Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us.”

Only a small boy sees them leaving and follows as the babies chase butterflies in trees, frogs in a bog, even bats in a cave, ignoring pleas to come back. But not to worry, our hero saves the day, making sure that all the babies get home safely from their appealing adventures.

“I don’t want to be another one of those people who just pretend like they don’t know about the suffering, like they don’t see it every single day, like they don’t walk past it on their way to school or work.”

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

After being a long time in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began to be worrying himself over his wife’s ill-humor and reproaches, over his children’s health and education, and the petty details of his official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to go and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there in which he moved, where people lived—really lived—instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the fire.