Reality

"When you’ve been given a curse of perspective you don’t stop to consider the gift of oversight that most humans have been bestowed with."

"There is but one reality, that is true -- but the two of you experience it in slightly different ways. The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is very much a looking glass, Miss Lancaster."

"People underestimate the impact of a new reality."

"Tell the truth. It's your duty to do so. It's up to them how they take in the information. Keep it real."

"Sometimes regardless of what we want, reality takes over."

"Poverty is a curse. Don't call it. It takes few generations to come out from the curse of poverty."

"Your reality is not my reality."

"Well, what's reality, then? Is it what I think or what other people think?"

"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is."

"We all live partially in reality and partially in a world of make-believe."

"The ultimate aim of reality is to become science fiction!"

"Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality we can hold - intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally - and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality. Civilization also has a limited perception of Infinite Reality. And with a haughty self-assurance, it imposes that perception on us until we think it is our own."

"The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning . Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth."

"Jokes are hilarious only when you take them unreal and dreamlike, otherwise it becomes painful. So I always live otherworldly..."

"In a reality known as the garden of beautiful eden, Adam is dreaming about his sinful children on earth. He is struggling to wake up from a terrible nightmare."

"To rule out the possibility of belief in another's reality is to encapsulate that reality and, thus, to impose implicity the hegemony of one's own view of the world."

"Life has to go on..."

"Good fiction doesn’t claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice—the way we all know things should be—without suggesting that’s how things really are. Good fiction is the mirage that declares itself a mirage, yet compels us to faith through its beauty. Good fiction is the dream that’s too good to be true, so perfect and symmetrical that it gives itself away every time. But it doesn’t trick you into suspending your disbelief by trying to look anything like reality. Good fiction makes you acutely, painfully aware of your disbelief, and makes you believe anyway. And when it’s done well—when it’s done right—good fiction is more real than reality."

"...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable."

"I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats."