Reality

"I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving."

"There is a point when facing the unknown stops being a longed-for adventure and becomes a terrifying reality."

"In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be."

"what you knowand don’t deny thatyou don’t knowand knowing thisyou knowwhat and whyyou don’t know. Right?"

"No one is normal. Everyone is just pretending to be normal."

"And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles..."

"Each of us has immense potential to achieve what we desire, unless you enliven and enlighten your life with inspiration, bring your dreams into reality through the power of desire you will never shine as bright as your potential."

"Each of us has immense potential to achieve what we desire, unless we enliven and enlighten our life with inspiration, bring our dreams or desires into reality we will never shine as bright as our potential."

"Miracles can only inhabit the reality of our awareness when we surrender our need for the familiar to our desire for the limitless."

"What you hate, you re-create; and what you bless, you put to rest."

"Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals"

"I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis."

"The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation."

"Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion... Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality."

"Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life."

"Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality, is realized."

"But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me."

"You are here on earth to unearth who on earth you are."

"Then he realized: 'I, indeed, am this creation; for I have poured it forth from myself.' In that way he became this creation. And verily, he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator."

"Your thoughts do not create reality. They either permit it or they do not."