Reality

"In fiction: we find the predictable boring. In real life: we find the unpredictable terrifying."

"During sex, people are often way too focused on giving or taking to actually just celebrate this moment, be themselves completely, and rejoice in their own realities."

"Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed."

"The speed felt tremendous. And the bottom of the ravine was treacherous. She ought to control her mount somehow - slow it; steer it to safer footing. Of course. And while she was at it, she ought to defeat the Alend Monarch's army, take care of Master Gilbur and the arch-Imager Vagel, and produce peace on earth. While composing great music with her free hand. Instead of doing all that, however, she concentrated with a pure white intensity that resembled terror on simply staying in the saddle"

"This was a cruel world she had been born into, all pink and squirming. She'd never wanted to see reality. Now, like the cold, it was impossible to ignore."

"The sad truth is,we are all grown ups and most of us arematured. However, not all of us are old enough toaccept that loving someone doesn'tguarantee you that they will love you inreturn."

"Words are a powerful aphrodisiac. They have the ability to awaken emotion, to excite the minds and senses. The right words entice, creep and crawl along the skin like the sensuous touch of a skilled lover. THAT my friends, is truly magical indeed..."

"Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere."

"Whatever you believe to be true, whether it is true or not; if you believe it, then to you it becomes the truth."

"Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality."

"When imagination changes from hoping to knowing, it makes things real."

"Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all."

"The way individuals live together. The truth of each individual is only the truth of his own narrow perspective. The entirety of mankind and of human qualities is always seen through a prisim, where its colours are broken. Observation is so utterly different from experinnce; there is no hope of fusing their contardictions, as the I and the not-I have been foes from the world's beginning."

"The strange paradox of science is that it does not explain reality, it explains our fantasy. It is a beautiful thing."

"Ali, Son of the Father of the Seeker Ali said: 'None may arrive at the Truth until he is able to think that the Path itself may be wrong. This is because those who can only believe that it must be right are not believers, but people who are incapable of thinking otherwise than they already think. Such people are not men at all. Like animals they must follow certain beliefs, and during this time they cannot learn. Because they cannot be called “humanity”, they cannot arrive at the Truth."

"The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality."

"In your mind you are cheating somebody, but in reality you are cheating yourself."

"Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?"

"We are to blame if reality does not take the form we desire. Whatever we have not desired with sufficient strength, that we call nonexistent. Desire it, imbrue it with your blood, your sweat, your tears, and it will take on a body. Reality is nothing more than the chimera subjected to our desire and our suffering."

"Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa. And the most dangerous delusion of all is that there is only one reality."