Reality

"Oh God just look at me now... one night opens words and utters pain... I cannot begin to explain to you... this... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it?I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty...these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things... If I told you what was really in my head, you''d never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive."

"A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer."

"You get what you give. What you put into things is what you get out of them."

"Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible."

"I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone."

"The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head."

"Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality."

"You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens."

"I have a subconscious list of rules for how reality should work. I did not develop these rules on purpose, and most of them don’t make sense – which is disturbing when you consider that they are an attempt to govern the behavior of reality – but they exist, and they play a large role in determining how I react to the things that happen to me. Large enough that a majority of the feelings I feel are simply a reaction to reality not complying with my arbitrary set of rules. Reality doesn’t give a shit about my rules, and this upsets me."

"Shoving feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."

"The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out."

"Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject."

"You can only get outside yourself by looking inside."

"We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)"

"The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore."

"Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge."

"People reject what they do not understand because it makes them feel small. They would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger."

"It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there."

"I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it."

"I am real. This”–he put his other hand over the first-“is real. You see me interacting with other people all day long, don’t you? I talk to people; I affect things in the world. I cause things to happen. I am real.”“But-but what if this whole place”-I had to suck in air again-“what if everything is inside my head? East Shoal and Scarlet and this bridge and you-what if you’re not real because nothing is real?”“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?"