Unreality Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Unreality.

Quotes About Unreality

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Now, what is unique about the child's perception of the world? For one thing, the extreme confusion of cause-and-effect relationships; for another, extreme unreality about the limits of his own powers. The child lives in a situation of utter dependence; and when his needs are met it must seem to him that he has magical powers, real omnipotence. If he experiences pain, hunger, or discomfort, all he has to do is to scream and he is relieved and lulled by gentle, loving sounds. He is a magician and a telepath who has only to mumble and to imagine and the world turns to his desires. ~ Ernest Becker
Unreality quotes by Ernest Becker
Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow. ~ James Freeman Clarke
Unreality quotes by James Freeman Clarke
It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ]

Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes - or aspires to become - a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factor ~ Emil M. Cioran
Unreality quotes by Emil M. Cioran
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to great old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. ~ Virginia Woolf
Unreality quotes by Virginia Woolf
Rachel arched, deliberately parting herself more widely over him, inviting him deeper into her body. She heard his intake of air, felt the raw tremor that shook him. Sweat sprang out on his skin, making him glow copper in the half-light. His lips drew back, baring his teeth as he fought for the control she was intent on denying him; then, with a rough sound somewhere between a groan and a purr, his hips jackhammered, and he thrust himself all the way in.
Time stopped. Rachel registered the wild dilation in Cullen's eyes, her own sense of unreality. She was backed up against a wall, her arms and legs wrapped around Cullen, and he was so deep inside her that her muscles quivered in reaction to his alien heat and hardness. ~ Fiona Brand
Unreality quotes by Fiona Brand
I laughed and discovered something that has served me well since: the more we threaten thought and language with silence, or simply seek to demote them in our lives from the ludicrous pedestal on which our culture and background have placed them, then the more fertile, in their need to justify and assert themselves, they become. Reflection is never more exciting than when reflecting on the damage reflection does, language never more seductive than when acknowledging its unreality. ~ Tim Parks
Unreality quotes by Tim Parks
Whatever the new movie about Apple founder Steve Jobs unearths, one thing is doubtless: we will switch our Apple computers right back on (maybe to talk about it, maybe not) right after we see the film. Could anything short of one genuine civic conscience, related in all sincerity stop us from miring ourselves in pirouettes of unreality, counting stickers on blue and white virtual flypaper as dearer in our imaginations than anyone in our daily lives, perhaps even our own family members? ~ John Thomas Allen
Unreality quotes by John Thomas Allen
Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Unreality quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair. ~ Catherine Lacey
Unreality quotes by Catherine Lacey
I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die ... ~ Roland Barthes
Unreality quotes by Roland Barthes
Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true. ~ Saul Bellow
Unreality quotes by Saul Bellow
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Unreality quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The reason we see hypocrisy and fraud and unreality in others is because they are all in our own hearts. The great characteristic of a saint is humility-Yes, all those things and other evils would have been manifested in me but for the grace of God, therefore I have no right to judge. ~ Oswald Chambers
Unreality quotes by Oswald Chambers
Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous ... What had Evelyn really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his room. ~ Virginia Woolf
Unreality quotes by Virginia Woolf
Recognise that the apparent is unreal, while the unmanifest is abiding. Through this initiation into truth you will escape falling into unreality again. ~ Ashtavakra
Unreality quotes by Ashtavakra
The question of "unreality"is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important. ~ Bertrand Russell
Unreality quotes by Bertrand Russell
Something had been taken away from him in the war, against his will, and he would never be the same. Years in labour camps, in mountains, in salt mines: only solitude was natural to him now. Some part of him was terminally tired. He was beyond intimacy. The pretence at normality, the weight of the past, the unreality of the days here had exhausted him. ~ Joan London
Unreality quotes by Joan London
Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality. ~ Gerald Durrell
Unreality quotes by Gerald Durrell
Leave us some unreality. Do not make us too offensively sane. ~ Oscar Wilde
Unreality quotes by Oscar Wilde
Our knowledge is within the network of Mâyâ (unreality), and beyond that is freedom. Within the network there is slavery, it is all under law; beyond that there is no law. So far as the universe is concerned, existence is ruled by law, and beyond that is freedom. ~ Swami Vivekananda
Unreality quotes by Swami Vivekananda
What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.
The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence. ~ Susan Griffin
Unreality quotes by Susan Griffin
It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind than is involved in the assertion of the unreality of Space or of the unreality of Matter. So decisive a breach with that natural position is not to be lightly accepted. And yet in all ages the belief in the unreality of time has proved singularly attractive. ~ J.M.E. McTaggart
Unreality quotes by J.M.E. McTaggart
Metaphysics, said the late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct; but metaphysics has changed in the meantime, and is now the finding of bad reasons for what we cannot possibly believe however hard we try. All I can say is that the disbelief in the reality of consciousness or personal identity has never prevented anyone from copyrighting his book in which that unreality is argued; and I very much doubt that any author of such a book has ever been completely indifferent as to the bank account into which its royalties were paid. ~ Theodore Dalrymple
Unreality quotes by Theodore Dalrymple
When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. ~ Thomas Merton
Unreality quotes by Thomas Merton
Francis Spufford, using very contemporary idiom, calls for the same thing in this way. When discussing our sinfulness, he says: What we're talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It's our active inclination to break stuff, "stuff" here including . . . promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people's. . . . [You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don't harmonize: whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time. You're equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings. . . . You're human, and that's where we live; that's our normal experience.180 Until we fully acknowledge the chaos within us that the Bible calls sin, we live in what Calvin calls "unreality. ~ Timothy J. Keller
Unreality quotes by Timothy J. Keller
Grand Thoughts that never can be wearied out,
Showing the unreality of Time. ~ Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton
Unreality quotes by Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton
Time heals nothing; it merely manages the hurt through a lens of unreality. The only salvation is to walk into your reality ~ R.J. Blizzard
Unreality quotes by R.J. Blizzard
If [things] seem to have a relative unreality ... it is because they are potential and not actual; they are unfulfilled ... They have it in them to be more real than they are. ~ G.K. Chesterton
Unreality quotes by G.K. Chesterton
Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. A ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Unreality quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I grew up not understanding what was true and what was not true. It gave me a sense of unreality. I was told that this man [mom's lover] was not my mother's lover - when he was. I was told he was there as a male babysitter for my brother so that he would learn sports and other manly things. ~ Carly Simon
Unreality quotes by Carly Simon
I'm one of the school of people who don't do research of the reality of the thing or the unreality of the thing. In all the movies I've done, I've never done any research. ~ Billy Connolly
Unreality quotes by Billy Connolly
Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. ~ Emil Cioran
Unreality quotes by Emil Cioran
Always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew. ~ Stella Benson
Unreality quotes by Stella Benson
Human life is but of brief duration. 'All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God shall stand forever' (Isa. 40:6, 8). Let us hold fast to the commandment that abides, and despise the unreality that passes away. ~ Saint Basil
Unreality quotes by Saint Basil
For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub-Creative Art in itself, and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of 'unreality' (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the dominion of 'observed fact,' in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connexions of fantasy with fantastic: with images of things that are not only 'not actually present,' but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. But while admitting that, I do not assent to the depreciative tone. That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most Potent.

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being 'arrested.' They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Unreality quotes by J.R.R. Tolkien
An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice. ~ Romain Gary
Unreality quotes by Romain Gary
Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the main 'a rest from toil.' He makes Pericles say: 'Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year. ~ Jane Ellen Harrison
Unreality quotes by Jane Ellen Harrison
… sometimes in life we can't grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. That boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement, otherwise we won't know which side we're on. ~ Haruki Murakami
Unreality quotes by Haruki Murakami
I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain. ~ Alan W. Watts
Unreality quotes by Alan W. Watts
To say "I" is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other. ~ Alberto Manguel
Unreality quotes by Alberto Manguel
As I pass out into the blackness,
I wonder if I have ever really known you -
Or if you exist at all,
And are not but a twisted, fevered, silver creation of my brain.
And the unreality of you comes over me,
Like a mist upon a lonely sea. ~ Mercedes De Acosta
Unreality quotes by Mercedes De Acosta
You remember the fairy tales you were told when you were very small - 'once upon a time ... ' Why do you think they always began like that?"
"Because they weren't true," Simon said promptly.
Jane said, caught up in the unreality of the high remote place, "Because perhaps they were true once, but nobody could remember them. ~ Susan Cooper
Unreality quotes by Susan Cooper
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. ~ Charlie Pierce
Unreality quotes by Charlie Pierce
Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person. ~ Sherry Turkle
Unreality quotes by Sherry Turkle
Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages; one even made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner. Her own case, of course, would be different. ~ Edith Wharton
Unreality quotes by Edith Wharton
DURING THAT YEAR, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. ~ John Edward Williams
Unreality quotes by John Edward Williams
I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality. ~ Janet Frame
Unreality quotes by Janet Frame
Ok, this farmer is driving down the road in his truck and he comes to a state cop in the middle of the road with the blue flashing and everything, and the farmer asks, What's the problem, Officer?
The cop looks worried and nods on ahead where this pig is sitting right in the middle of the road-big damn pig- and the cop says, Got a problem with this pig in the road. So the farmer says, Hmmm. And the cop says, Hey I got an idea, Why don't we load this pig into your truck and then you take him to the zoo? And the farmer says, Well, I reckon we could do that. So they load they pig into the farmer's truck and off the farmer drives and that's that.
So the next day the cop is out there on the road again because that is his usual speed trap, and who do you think drives by? The farmer--and sitting right next to him in the cab is the pig. And the pig's wearing a baseball hat! The farmer and the pig just go cruising by.
So the cop shakes off the unreality of the whole situation, fires up the blue flashing light and sirens and gets scratch in 3 gears tearing out after the farmer, and caught up pretty soon and pulls the farmer over and walks up to the truck. The farmer looks real casual and says, Yessir.
The cop says, Hey, I thought I told you to take that pig to the zoo! And the farmer says, I did! We had a good time, too, so today I thought we'd go to the ball game.
HA! HA! HA! ~ Robert Wintner
Unreality quotes by Robert Wintner
Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space. Outside, in the streets, the Communist state was busy performing such experiments for real. In response, Krzhizhanovsky's prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm ... It is a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear. ~ Adam Thirlwell
Unreality quotes by Adam Thirlwell
He had first been excited by Facebook, ghosts of old friends suddenly morphing to life with wives and husbands and children, and photos trailed by comments. But he began to be appalled by the air of unreality, the careful manipulation of images to create a parallel life, pictures that people had taken with Facebook in mind, placing in the background the things of which they were proud. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Unreality quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. ~ Terence McKenna
Unreality quotes by Terence McKenna
Beautiful lives women live - women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unreality in which the shades and shapes of facts - of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair - move with the substanceless decorum of lawn party charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or any ability to hurt. ~ William Faulkner
Unreality quotes by William Faulkner
Loneliness is a source of loathsome ice-cold suffering, the suffering of unreality. At such times we need people to teach us that we're not really so far gone. ~ Peter Handke
Unreality quotes by Peter Handke
Thoughts are phantoms. And when you fight with phantoms they always win. ~ Marty Rubin
Unreality quotes by Marty Rubin
I withdraw my consent from reality. I deny it my assistance. I dedicate myself to the temptations of escapism, and throw myself wholeheartedly into the endlessness of unreality. ~ Ursula Poznanski
Unreality quotes by Ursula Poznanski
I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself. ~ Paul Auster
Unreality quotes by Paul Auster
I was dizzy in that room. I felt faint with disbelief. I held on to the seat of my chair to stay upright. I knew what was going on, but I couldn't absorb any of it. ~ Sonali Deraniyagala
Unreality quotes by Sonali Deraniyagala
The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it. ~ Allan Sherman
Unreality quotes by Allan Sherman
Esoterically, the Hanged Man is the human spirit which is suspended from heaven by a single thread. Wisdom, not death, is the reward for this voluntary sacrifice during which the human soul, suspended above the world of illusion, and meditating upon its unreality, is rewarded by the achievement of self-realization. ~ Manly P. Hall
Unreality quotes by Manly P. Hall
No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her. ~ Scott Spencer
Unreality quotes by Scott Spencer
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it. ~ Michael Cunningham
Unreality quotes by Michael Cunningham
A bright haze seemed to lie over everything, and she had a feeling of unreality, but the scene itself looked almost unbelievably wholesome, like something out of a commercial. Just your average family sitting down to eat turkey, she thought. One slightly flustered aunt, worried that the peas will be mushy and the rolls burnt, one comfortable uncle-to-be, one golden-haired teenage niece and her baby sister. One blue-eyed boy-next-door type, one spritely girlfriend, one gorgeous vampire passing the vegetables. A typical American household. ~ L.J.Smith
Unreality quotes by L.J.Smith
There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up. ~ Jeanette Winterson
Unreality quotes by Jeanette Winterson
Erwin Strauss, in his brilliant monograph on obsession, similarly earlier showed how repulsed Swift was by the animality of the body, by its dirt and decay. Straus pronounced a more clinical judgment on Swift's disgust, seeing it as part of the typical obsessive's worldview: "For all obsessives sex is severed from unification and procreation....Through the...isolation of the genitals from the whole of the body, sexual functions are experienced as excretions and as decay." This degree of fragmentation is extreme, but we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In t his horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwi ~ Ernest Becker
Unreality quotes by Ernest Becker
We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality. ~ Peter Greenaway
Unreality quotes by Peter Greenaway
They sat islanded in their foreignness, irrelevant now that the holiday season had ended, anachronistic, outstaying their welcome, no longer necessary to anyone's plans. Priorities had shifted; the little town was settling down for its long uninterrupted hibernation. No one came here in the winter. The weather was too bleak, the snow too distant, the amenities too sparse to tempt visitors. And they felt that the backs of the residents had been turned on them with a sigh of relief, reminding them of their transitory nature, their fundamental unreality. And when Monica at last succeeded in ordering coffee, they still sat, glumly, for another ten minutes, before the busy waitress remembered their order.
'Homesick,' said Edith finally. 'Yes.' But she thought of her little house as if it had existed in another life, another dimension. She thought of it as something to which she might never return. The seasons had changed since she last saw it; she was no longer the person who could sit up in bed in the early morning and let the sun warm her shoulders and the light make her impatient for the day to begin. That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself. She bent her head over her coffee, trying to believe that it was the steam rising from the cup that was making her eyes prick. This cannot go on, she thought. ~ Anita Brookner
Unreality quotes by Anita Brookner
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together. ~ Edith Wharton
Unreality quotes by Edith Wharton
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
Unreality quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
In a sense, all these stories make up one story, namely that of a people struggling to see the face of God, to pierce the riddle of loneliness, the mist of unreality, and to come to full meaning of life. Because it is a story of struggle, this story can shed much light on our own struggle to break out of the slavery of loneliness and to meet others and God in intimacy and love. ~ Ronald Rolheiser
Unreality quotes by Ronald Rolheiser
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. ~ William Faulkner
Unreality quotes by William Faulkner
During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: 'I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.' Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I believed that madness was a state of insensibility where there was neither pain nor suffering nor joy, but particularly, no responsibility. Never, for one instant, has I even imagined what 'to lose one's reason' actually meant. ~ Marguerite Sechehaye
Unreality quotes by Marguerite Sechehaye
Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment. ~ Halldor Laxness
Unreality quotes by Halldor Laxness
My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts ... ~ Joel-Peter Witkin
Unreality quotes by Joel-Peter Witkin
It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane. ~ Philip Jose Farmer
Unreality quotes by Philip Jose Farmer
There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming. ~ Al Gore
Unreality quotes by Al Gore
Life is too short for unreality and you don't owe anybody anything - especially your time, energy, and attention. ~ Oli Anderson
Unreality quotes by Oli Anderson
But then Lalita did something odd. Well, not odd, but beautiful. She shifted the clay pot of water from her right hip to her left. She pushed it up against the curve of her waist, wrapped her arm around the neck of the pot, and disappeared around the bend. Mohan knelt to the ground; he could taste the earthen dampness clinging to her waist. He knew then that he'd been wrong: she wasn't simply happy; happiness could not possibly explain the strange loveliness, the utter seductiveness, of that gesture. No, what Lalita had was something even more audacious than happiness. What was it? Mohan trembled....

Sitting on his bed that afternoon, after lunch, Mohan decided that the clay of the pot and the bronze of Lalita's skin were the only true substances. They were why the rains fell, why the sun rose. His fingers traced them all his life. Then he knew. He knew what Lalita had that the others didn't, that he didn't; she had sex. In fact, he realized, what she had was the opposite of what he had. But what was it that he had? What was the opposite of sex? It seemed like a question without an answer. Like where does reality stop and unreality begin? Or, what goes deeper, the human soul or the human imagination? But this one had an answer. That much Mohan knew. He knew that the opposite of sex was fear. And fear was something he had an abundance of. ~ Shobha Rao
Unreality quotes by Shobha   Rao
there is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. his specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter. ~ John D. MacDonald
Unreality quotes by John D. MacDonald
The only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality o the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops ~ Jeff Lindsay
Unreality quotes by Jeff Lindsay
By then the man had returned and set the kettle among the embers. Then he looked up, paused, then picked up his share of the bread and reached over to put it in front of me.
"That's yours," I said.
"You appear to need it more than I do," he said, looking amused. "Go ahead. I won't starve."
I picked up the bread, feeling a weird sense of unreality: Did he expect me to be grateful? The situation was so strange I simply had to turn it into absurdity--it was either that or sink into fear and apprehension. "Well, does it matter if I starve?" I said. "Or do Galdran's torturers require only plump victims for their arts?"
The man had started to unload something from the saddlebag at his side, but he stopped and looked up with that contemplative gaze again, his broad-brimmed black hat just shadowing his eyes. "The situation has altered," he said slowly. "You must perceive how your value has changed."
His words, his tone--as if he expected an outbreak of hysterics--fired my indignation. Maybe my situation was desperate, and sooner than later I was going to be having nightmares about it--but not for the entertainment of some drawling Court-bred flunky.
"He'll try to use me against my brother," I said in my flattest voice.
"I rather suspect he will be successful. In the space of one day your brother and his adherents attacked our camp twice. It would appear they are not indifferent to your fate."
I remembered then that he had said something about ~ Sherwood Smith
Unreality quotes by Sherwood Smith
All these people like my mother paying counselors and clinics to reattach them to reality; all of us people here paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality. ~ David Mitchell
Unreality quotes by David Mitchell
Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances. ~ Grant Morrison
Unreality quotes by Grant Morrison
I can never feel that the Illusion of Life is a truth as long as any illusion reflects unreality; however, even an untruth is a truth in its turn. ~ Sorin Cerin
Unreality quotes by Sorin Cerin
IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them. ~ Stafford Beer
Unreality quotes by Stafford Beer
The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality. ~ Oswald Chambers
Unreality quotes by Oswald Chambers
We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality. ~ Peter Kreeft
Unreality quotes by Peter Kreeft
To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality. ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Unreality quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race. ~ Amedeo Modigliani
Unreality quotes by Amedeo Modigliani
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it. ~ Albert Camus
Unreality quotes by Albert Camus
There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality ~ Matt Taibbi
Unreality quotes by Matt Taibbi
I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself. ~ Bram Stoker
Unreality quotes by Bram Stoker
For the past two weeks he's been feeling so superior and smart because of all the things he knows from the war, but forget it, they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality's bitch; what they don't know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he's lived what he's lived and knows what he knows, which means what, something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war?
Their reality dominates, except for this: It can't save you. It won't stop any bombs or bullets. He wonders if there's a saturation point, a body count that will finally blow the homeland dream to smithereens. How much reality can unreality take? ~ Ben Fountain
Unreality quotes by Ben Fountain
There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love. ~ Anthony Powell
Unreality quotes by Anthony Powell
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is. ~ Gertrude Stein
Unreality quotes by Gertrude Stein
A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining? ~ Saul Bellow
Unreality quotes by Saul Bellow
Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world. ~ Dervla Murphy
Unreality quotes by Dervla Murphy
The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows. ~ Adolfo Bioy Casares
Unreality quotes by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The calamities that are constantly being reported - battles, massacres, famines, revolutions - tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. ~ George Orwell
Unreality quotes by George Orwell
Thoughts that deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony. ~ Rudolf Steiner
Unreality quotes by Rudolf Steiner
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now ... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
Unreality quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
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