reality Quotes

“Now you’re looking for the secret... but you wont find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”

“It’s only natural to confuse truth and fantasy as they play parts in a theatrical.”

“Maybe I really don’t want this, she thought. This is summer camp. This is a novel. This isn’t home. I need something real.”

“I thought that if I did not eat and drink then death would simply follow, but in practice I found that thirst becomes such a frantic obsession that it takes a greater resolve than mine to resist it.”

“These problems are real, and you can’t turn off real life. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.”

“No one cares about the man in the box, the man who disappears.”

“‘Are they changed because they want to go back to their old life, or is it because they’re so depressed at realizing their old life was no better than what we have now?’”

“JUROR #9: No. He wouldn’t really lie. But perhaps he made himself believe he heard those words and recognized the boy’s face.”

“JUROR #8: You don’t really mean you’ll kill me, do you?”

“Who wanted to reassure her? Mr. Nobley or the actual man, Actor X?”

“We make Hell real; we stoke its fires. And in its flames our hope expires. Heaven, too, is merely our creation. We can grant ourselves our own salvation. All that’s required is imagination.”

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”

“You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent.”

“yes, the real miracles are the thousands of tiny people who know exactly what they are doing. I used to look for inspiration in higher places but the higher you go like to Plato or God the less space there is in which to stand.”

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

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

“The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles.”

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

“I’ve committed to nothing...and that’s just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”

The world is “an illusion. One we can either submit to – as most do – or transcend.”

″‘He doesn’t smell right!’ he exclaimed. ‘He isn’t a rabbit at all! He isn’t real!’ ‘I am Real!’ said the little Rabbit. ‘I am Real! The Boy said so!’ And he nearly began to cry.”

″‘Wasn’t I Real before?’ asked the little Rabbit. ‘You were Real to the Boy,’ the Fairy said, ‘because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.‘”

″‘Why don’t you get up and play with us?’ one of them asked. ‘I don’t feel like it,’ said the Rabbit, for he didn’t want to explain that he had no clockwork. ‘Ho!’ said the furry rabbit. ‘It’s as easy as anything,’ And he gave a big hop sideways and stood on his hind legs. ‘I don’t believe you can!’ he said. ‘I can!’ said the little Rabbit. ‘I can jump higher than anything!’ He meant when the Boy threw him, but of course he didn’t want to say so.”

“But very soon he grew to like it, for the Boy used to talk to him, and made nice tunnels for him under the bedclothes that he said were like the burrows the real rabbits lived in.”

“Realistic thinking is based on what others think is possible—but they are not you and have no way of knowing your potential and purposes.”

“Jesus stands between us and God, and for that very reason he stands between us and all other men and things. He is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.”

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great realist. He was one of the few who quickly understood, even before Hitler came to power, that National Socialism was a brutal attempt to make history without God and to found it on the strength of man alone.”

“And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

“I feel no malice toward this girl. I don’t even envy her. Watching, I am simply emptied, and in the dream I want to cry out, because she is something I can never be, some possibility in my life that can never be fulfilled.”

“It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?”

“It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it?”

“Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.”

“There was nothing else there in the mirror. Just her, in the corridor. A hand touched her shoulder, and she looked up. The other mother stared down at Coraline with big black button eyes.”

“The more you get set into your own world, the smaller your world becomes.”

“You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

“You can’t handle the truth. You can’t handle the sad but historic reality.”

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”

“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more ‘Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.’ It’s rarely the truth: ‘I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.’ ”

“A significant portion of what we call reality was shaped by human effort.”

″‘Are you the real Nate?’ Pigeon asked. ‘We’re all the real Nate,’ Nate said. ‘It’s complicated.‘”

″‘It’s like you said the other day,’ said Adam. ‘You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nuclear waste hang-in’ about for millions of years. ’Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion.‘”

“Ego is the enemy- giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. It’s defensive, precisely when we cannot afford to be defensive. It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.”

″‘No pulse,’ Nate confirmed. ‘Our hearts don’t need to beat, we breathe only out of habit . . . no wonder Mrs. White said we could get trapped in here forever.‘”

“The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.”

“The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.”

“Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”

“They pretend to themselves they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. ”

“They had worked two and three jobs, put children through high school and college, and become pillars of their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I was merely encountering the survivors...”

“Verily, there is nothing, right or wrong, which belief, plus burning desire, cannot make real.”

“You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all.”

“What came to her then was the dustiness of the floor, the feeling that her clothes were more next to her than on her, and the sudden realization that this would all be for nothing—that her mother would never write back and she would never see her again. The reality of this gave her a second Watschen. It stung her, and it did not stop for many minutes.”

″ You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. ”

“The problem is, I can’t tell what real anymore, and what’s made up.”

“Prince Jones had made it through and still they had taken him.”

“It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated.”

“Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“Here it is, here it is at last, the encounter with reality. . . . All is lost now!”

“Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly feared losing.”

“For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

“We live our lives as if they were one big emergency! We often rush around looking busy, trying to solve problems, but in reality, we are often compounding them.”

“Ever since Olly came into my life there’ve been two Maddys: the one who lives through books and doesn’t want to die, and the one who lives and suspects that death will be a small price to pay for it. The first Maddy is surprised at the direction of her thoughts. The second Maddy, the one from the Hawaii photograph? She’s like a god—impervious to cold, famine, disease, natural and man-made disasters. She’s impervious to heartbreak. The second Maddy knows that this pale half life is not really living.”

“The world he thought he knew no longer made sense to him, and he began to change.”

“But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.”

“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.”

“All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.”

“Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”

“He did not fear ridicule, he had never known it.”

“There is a reason why all things are as they are.”

“Looking into another person’s eyes for an extended period of time proved to be a powerful thing. And if you don’t believe me, try it yourself.”

“What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you’re not inventing at all.”

“I don’t want to stay in the bad place, where no one believes in silver linings or love or happy endings.”

“I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.”

“...I am now watching the movie of my life as I live it.”

“You need to know it’s your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.”

“When life reaches out with a moment like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back.”

“I think all it really takes for different people to get along is a common rooting interest and a few beers.”

“I believe in happy endings,” I tell him, “And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.”

“There will always be a part of me that is dirty and sloppy, but I like that, just like all the other parts of myself.”

“She looks sad. She looks angry. She looks different from everyone else I know—she cannot put on that happy face others wear when they know they are being watched. She doesn’t put on a face for me, which makes me trust her somehow.”

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

“Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”

“We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”

“He believed the stars were wishes, and that one day they would all come true.”

“Watch your thoughts. Every thought accepted as true is sent by your brain to your solar plexus – your abdominal brain – and is brought into your world as a reality.”

“The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.”

“Masses of the people think that feminism is always the only about women seeking to be equal to men. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

″ I stand in awe of anyone who hatches a dream and who shows the guts to hang tough, all alone, and see it through to reality.”

“Martha: Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.”

“You’d rather make up a fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.”

“Honey: Oh, isn’t this lovely. Nick: Yes indeed…very handsome. ”

“George: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf,… Martha: I...am...George...I...am...”

“I smile, because it’s so cute. And for a second, just for a second, I forget. I forget that this isn’t real.”

“George: national boundaries, the level of the ocean, political allegiances, practical morality…none of these would I stake my stick on anymore.”

“How am I supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? It feels like I’m the only one who doesn’t know the difference.”

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child – except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact.”

“Nick: I married her because she was pregnant. … It was a hysterical pregnancy. She blew up, and then she went down.”

“George: the one thing in this whole sinking world that I am sure of is my … chromosomological partnership in the…creation of our…blond-eyed, blue-haired…son.”

“Martha: Can I get you a drink, Martha? Why, thank you, George; that’s very kind of you. No, Martha, no; why I’d do anything for you.”

“The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

“I’ve got the directions all memorized from a little map Monsanto’s mailed me but in my imagination dreaming about this big retreat back home there’d been something larkish, bucolic, all homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the dark.”

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…”

“Whatever you’re constantly saying, you’re moving toward.”

″‘No weapon formed against me will ever prosper. I will live out my days in good health, with a clear mind, with good memory, with clarity of thought. My mind is alert. My senses are sharp. My youth is being renewed.’ You must prophesy health. Prophesy a long, productive life. Your words will become your reality.”

“All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.”

“The practice of spirituality involved discovering that which transcends the body, as well as learning how to become attached to that transcendent reality as the truth, rather than remaining attached to the physical body and its desires and impulses, as well as to one’s emotions throughout the ups and downs of human existence.”

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”

“Human consciousness and universal consciousness are in reality one and the same.”

“The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”

“Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.”

“Never forget, the words are not the reality, only reality is reality; picture symbols are the idea, words are confusion.”

“I’d heard that if you accessed the simulation with a new state-of-the-art immersion rig, it was almost impossible to tell the OASIS from reality.”

“You’re asking yourself, can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm’s way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can’t. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that’s for sure . . . The best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That’s why it’s the wrong thing to ask, if you’re really trying to make a decision.”

“None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.”

“Were they not, like the chambered nautilus, only an iridescence dreamed by the sea?”

“You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don’t necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.”

“Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself. “Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him you’re going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.”

“So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.”

“...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”

″‘The thing I like,’ said Hazel, ‘is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.‘”

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”

“As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn’t exist.”

“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

“Logging into a chat room was a little like being in two places at once.”

“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

″‘And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods. They had feet like goats. And—’ ‘That’s all nonsense, for babies,’ said the King sternly.”

″‘And that means,’ continued Edmund, ‘that, once you’re out of Narnia, you have no idea how Narnian time is going. Why shouldn’t hundreds of years have gone past in Narnia while only one year has passed for us in England?‘”

“Huh, Dilsey said. Name aint going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks don’t have no luck, changing names. My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they’s long forgot me.”

“You will never understand the meaning of actual reality.”

″‘So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,’ she said to herself, ‘unless – unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream,’ she went on in a rather complaining tone: ‘I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!‘”

“From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that – for a certain period of time – we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.”

“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”

“There was something strange about hearing that word, like it didn’t belong to me anymore or shouldn’t be coming out of his mouth. Maybe it was because it made me face reality; that these past six months weren’t just some perpetual nightmare I was stuck in; that I wasn’t simply waiting for someone to wake me up and tell me none of it was real and that everything was fine.”

“You’ll live and get hurt.”

“Progressive identity politics ignores basic human realities. If you live authentically as yourself there will be repercussions. Not everyone will like you. Some people may even want you dead.”

“Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”

“And I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to exist inside that hopelessness. I just wanted to sink into this stolen moment with him and keep our doomed reality at bay.”

“He will not withhold all answers that you need for anything that seems to trouble you. He knows the way to solve all problems, and resolve all doubts. His certainty is yours. You need but ask it of Him, and it will be given you.”

“For the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope.”

“False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem and our greatest opportunity.”

“My father and I were close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers...I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.”

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh. there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.”

“What you see reflects your thinking, and your thinking but reflects the choice of what you want to see.”

“Forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear.”

“you fall into the mirror, come through the other side staring at a lightbulb.”

“It is in complete alignment with the reality that both businesses and individuals will begin, gather, and have more activities than they can reasonably sustain.”

“Cases are won on closing arguments only on television, not in a real courtroom.”

“How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.”

“Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.”

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

“The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

″ The confident young man in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy. ”

“Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”

“Fantasies always sound good, but they’re no help when reality comes and shoves you to the ground. When it trips up your tongue and traps the right words in your head. When it leaves you to eat lunch by yourself.”

“What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.”

“Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”

“‘Yet they’re tiresome in the end,’ Emma said; ‘these days, what I really adore are stories that can be read all in one go, and that frighten you. I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life.‘”

“And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality. ”

“The real world is where the monsters are.”

“I planned to waste away and die, but there is a spirit of life, even in one such as myself, that stands in the way of such decisions. ”

“Every time I took a few drops to slake it, I postponed my demise a little more. The same was true with food. Hunger is a monster.”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”

“If you’re gonna make it to the top, get a grip on this rock, and get a grip on yourself.”

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out the essence?”

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

“I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be.”

“They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.”

“Whatever life you lead, you must put your soul into it--to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you; it becomes reality!”

“If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.”

The solution to violence in America is the acceptance of reality.

“In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse . . . Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.”

“I’m left with a loneliness so overpowering it threatens to seep from my eyes. I have no one. Unfortunately, that’s not fantasy. That’s all-natural, 100 percent organic, unprocessed, reality.”

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.”

“What I was afraid of was that everyone present, from the insolent marker down to the lowest little stinking, pimply clerk in a greasy collar, would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest and to address them in literary language. For of the point of honour – not of honour, but of the point of honour – one cannot speak among us except in literary language. You can’t allude to the “point of honour” in ordinary language. I was fully convinced (the sense of reality, in spite of all my romanticism!) that they would all simply split their sides with laughter.”

“Reality is brimming over with beautiful things, scintillating feelings. How many of them have I been missing?”

“They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things . . . none of them starving . . . but merely hungry for choice and certainty.”

“Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.”

“Years and months had become weak, and people could push against them and wander back and forth in time. Maybe it had always been this way and he was only seeing it for the first time.”

“He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.”

“Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality. It would be only a mistake, a misfortune, a wrong path taken, her fixed ideas would never change.”

“Only I know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning.”

“There would be the sky and the mountains, the flowers and the girl and the feeling that all this was a nightmare, the faint consoling hope that I might wake up.”

“I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.”

“I must know more than I know already. For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains, and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream. But my dream had nothing to do with England and I must not think like this, I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.”

“I went to bed early and slept at once. I dreamed that I was walking in the forest. Not alone. Someone who hated me was with me, out of sight. I could hear heavy footsteps coming closer and though I struggled and screamed I could not move.”

“There were some weather blimps in front of us. They were all yellow in the sunset that was spreading over the CloudsTM.”

“When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud. But really, Marilla, the flying part is glorious as long as it lasts... it’s like soaring through a sunset. I think it almost pays for the thud.”

“You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.”

“I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They’re just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I’m married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything’s wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I’m still me. And I’m still here. And that is truly terrible.”

“That’s the worst of growing up, and I’m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don’t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.”

“No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.”

“Stressful thoughts reflect a conflict with reality. Stress happens when the mind resists what is.”

“After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?”

“If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life.”

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”

“Aim at secret wishes that have been thwarted or repressed, stirring up uncontrollable emotions, clouding their powers of reason. Lead the seduced to a point of confusion in which they can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality.”

“I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”

“From here on out, there’s just reality. I think that’s what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality. But then, what do I know?”

“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.”

“I had a dream about you last night... Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream.”

“Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and dreams and shadows, than with the actual world around me.”

“Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.”

“I had a dream about you last night... You tried to propose with a digital ceramic heater.”

“Our younger viewers will not remember the Batman. A recent survey shows that most high schoolers consider him a myth. But real he was. Even today, debate continues on the right and wrong of his one-man war on crime. This report would like to think that he’s alive and well, enjoying a celebratory drink in the company of friends...”

“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.”

“I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the beautiful princess has halitosis.”

“At the start of each new day, remind yourself: ‘I am talented. I am creative. I am greatly favored by God. I am equipped. I am well able. I will see my dreams come to pass.’ Declare those statements by faith and before long, you will begin to see them in reality.”

“The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality.”

“You are this earth. You are not a fantasy: you are my love. And love is friendship lit by a wooden match with a white tip on its red tip. I am your match, and you are mine.”

“I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.”

“I don’t want my idea of you. That’s too easy, and it isn’t real. I want you, faults and all. And I want you to want me, faults and all, not any ideas you have about love relationships-love-is not fantasy, it is bricks and mortar.”

“Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.”

“As soon as she said it, as soon as she talked about my dream like that and brought it out in the light and made it real, I saw only the impossibility of it all. I had a pa who would never let me go. I had no money and no prospect of getting any. And I had made a promise—one that would keep me here even if I had all the money in the world.”

“The word ‘mundane’ has come to mean ‘boring’ and ‘dull’, and it really shouldn’t - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from the latin mundus, meaning ‘the world’. And the world is anything but dull: The world is wonderful. There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.”

“Maybe nothing was real not even himself . . . wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

“He would never again be able to say hello how are you I love you. He would never again be able to hear music or the whisper of the wind through trees or the chuckle of running water. He would never again breathe in the smell of a steak frying in his mother’s kitchen . . . He would never again be able to see the faces of people who made you glad just to look at them.”

“People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.”

“You create your own reality.”

“How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.”

“Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.”

“Doctor I’ve wrestled with reality for 40 years and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally won out over it.”

“It is strange to hear your mother talk about being human because, honestly, it’s too easy to forget.”

“She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don’t dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?”

“To think of all the times I’ve wished I could slip into one of my favorite books. But that’s the advantage of reading—you can shut the book whenever you want.”

When J.J.’s mother reveals that she wants more time for her birthday, J.J. decides to go and find some. A task, at first, that seems like an impossible undertaking for a fifteen-year-old. That is until a neighbor shows J.J. an unlikely place to look for everyone’s lost time.

The people of ‘The Tree’ see a new threat on the horizon but wait what are they in reality, friend or foe?This is revealed to Toby as he observes and then later lives the fragile life of the ‘Grass’.But even as Toby begins a new life and leaves the tree and his grief behind something Elisha had said naggs at him:You have only one life Toby

It’s an interesting narrative with a mystical, child-like wonder that reminds you of a fairy tale. Many plot points are understated, so this book needs a lot of reading between the lines. An enjoyable read, definitely.

While waiting for help, Arthur notices two strange-looking men materializing out of thin air. They discuss a key and whether or not to give it to Arthur.

“Oh, yes, willful was what I wanted to be. Utterly willful. A willful girl was like a hen that crowed: something special.”

Instead of being stories of hope for children, I suspect their massive appeal lies in the fact they are really wildly-nostalgic stories for adults about how broken childhoods (and sometimes even broken adulthoods) should have been.

Arthur Penhaligon’s first days at his new school don’t go too well, particularly when a fiendish Mister Monday appears, gives Arthur a magical clock hand, and then orders his gang of dog-faced goons to chase Arthur around and get it back.

It’s the art and the illustration that will actually creep you out. Like a damn nightmare you cannot come out of. They are gory. Not the black and white or blood red gory but gory.

The story falls flat on the scare factor as the wolves are only perceived as the usual unwelcome guests in the family’s home and the story is slow-paced as it took time for the family to decide to rush back to their home.

“There was a fine young lady, And her name was Honor Brown. She didn’t want to go to school. She hoped it would burn down.”

Where have they gone and will they be coming home again? When Griffin starts school and meets Princess Layla the answers to his questions gently start to unfold.

Equating willfulness with being special, the child then confronts other themes of life such as eternity and loneliness. The cat declares that he is immortal. The girl concludes that they are both willful. As the girl identifies with the cat they discuss some of life’s themes. Loneliness is seen in the mailman and dog. The girl attempts to show empathy, but the cat will have none of that. He does not show compassion and is irritated that the girl will not follow his lead in being pitiless.

This wonderful story expresses through words that people can recover from painful comings and goings as long as they have the help of their friends and family and other loved ones.

She talks about her teacher being a toad, describes her classroom as being a hole, and goes as far as saying she is fed worms for lunch. However, although Honor Brown depicts her school as being such an awful place, the ending of the story takes an unexpected turn when Honor Brown finally finishes school and doesn’t have to go back as she cries and sobs and states that she will really miss school.