Reality

"Each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden.. forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa."

"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."

"If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own."

"Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water."

"If it looks real and feels real, do you think it matters if it's real?"

"Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?"

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

"Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way."

"When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that."

"If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place."

"The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility."

"Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question."

"Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?"

"Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine]"

"The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human."

"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost."

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

"Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

"Real dishes break. That's how you know they're real."