“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.”— Rainer Maria Rilke
“The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.”— Czes?aw Mi?osz
“I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.”— Richard Dawkins
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”— Malcolm Muggeridge
“YOU DEMAND SALVATION EVEN AS YOU STEAL FROM THE COLLECTION PLATE.YOU SEND FOOD TO THE REFUGEES, AND THEN YOU DON’T ALLOW THE DELIVERY TRUCKS THROUGH THE WARZONES. THE FOOD WILL SPOIL , THE SUPPLIES WILL BE SOLD BY THE VICTORS . THE CIVILIANS WILL STARVE AND SICKEN AND EVENTUALLY DIE. IT IS THE WAY OF THINGS. THEY WILL ALL DIE, WHETHER FROM THE BRUTAL SAVAGERY THAT IS UNIQUE TO MAN OR FROM THE ABUNDANCE OF DISEASE OR FROM THE SCARCITY OF SUSTENANCE.”— Jackie Morse Kessler
“I don’t think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I’m not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was– shall we be kind and say different? It’s a better, more general world than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn’t the practices, I don’t think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me–and the great voice of millions chanting, ‘Shame. Shame. Shame.’ It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.”— Ken Kesey
“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.”— Chris Kurtz
“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…”— Shan O’ Connor
“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.”— Paul Watzlawick
“Like a fire alarm going off in your ear, sulfur up your nose, mouth full of sour milk, reality is what it is – you deal with it.”— Dennis Vickers
“Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality. You might think that –by following language and a logic that appears consistent– you’re able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge.”— Haruki Murakami
“We tend to forget that everything has an ending, so enjoy it while you can still see it around you.”— Angel Phetheni
“Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.”— John Updike
“When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that’s the real world.”— Haruki Murakami
“Human beings not only can’t bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn’t force us close enough to the fire to feel the heat on our faces.”— Dean Koontz
“…there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb.”— Stephen King
“For a moment, the cardboard sets come crashing down to reveal that squalling monster, reality, locked up in the confines of its man-made cage. It is a fearsome thing, beautiful, inherent only to itself. Faced with such naked, existential truths, I understand why humans worship flesh-eating monsters and bloodthirsty gods.But only for a moment.”— Nenia Campbell
“Someone who begins to develop an interest in the teachings can tend to distance themselves from the reality of material things, as if the teachings were something completely apart from daily life. Often, at the bottom of all this, there is an attitude of giving up and running away from one’s own problems, with the illusion that one will be able to find something that will miraculously help one to transcend all that. But the teachings are based on the principle of our actual human condition. We have a physical body with all its various limits: each day we have to eat, work, rest, and so on. This is our reality, and we can’t ignore it.”— Namkhai Norbu
“He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it’s alive.”— Philip K. Dick
“You’re a romantic,” said Crabbe. “You expect too much. Reality’s always dull, you know, but when we see that it’s all there is, well-it miraculously ceases to be dull.”— Anthony Burgess
“Besides, I seemed to hold two lives—the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter.”— Charlotte Brontë