Reality

"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The Book World is as orderly as people in the Real World *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration."

"There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth."

"Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy."

"Mostly you are what they think you are."

"Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot. Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours."

"We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence."

"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality"

"The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits."

"The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."

"I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline."

"I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you."

"What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)"

"Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It’s bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back."

"Reality is what people who lack vision see."

"I leaned against my door, struggling to catch my breath, and thought that maybe hell wasn't a place at all, but a thing. A contagious thing. A thing that could creep up the steps, seep through the crack under my door, grow horns and sprout fire - smelling faintly like sulfur. A thing that could sink its tendrils inside and take root, coloring everything gray and distorting a smile into a sneer. And while i got dressed for the play, swatted at my back and kept running my hands over my stomach because I could feel it, I swear, I could feel it reaching for me, trying to grab hold."

"We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them."

"We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world."

"And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own."

"At Garvin High we were dealt a hard dose of reality this year. People hate. That's our reality. People hate and are hated and carry grudges and want punishments ... I don't know if it's possible to take hate away from people. Not even people like us, who've seen firsthand what hate can do. We're all hurting. We're all going to be hurting for a long time. And we, probably more than anyone else out there, will be searching for a new reality every day. A better one ... But in order to change reality you have to be willing to listen and to learn. And to hear. To actually hear."

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."