Reality

"Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected."

"The illusion is reality. The only contradiction is the observer."

"All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days."

"I wondered if that's what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody every got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn't have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die."

"Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true."

"Luckily, however, life doesn't always follow tradition, but craves out a path of its own."

"Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process."

"Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying."

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."

"Doffing the ego'ssafe glory, he findshis naked reality."

"You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again."

"Honor is honesty to what is, not blind duty to what you wish to be."

"A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story."

"It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown. Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world. If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself."

"It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile."

"Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape."

"I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you."

"Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there."

"It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night. At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew Mc Conaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer. Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers."

"My personal theory is that he has a very firm grasp upon reality, it's simply not a reality the rest of us have ever met before."