Quotes & Sayings About Life Being Unreal

I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. — Zadie Smith

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe. — E. M. Forster

It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. — Zadie Smith

A good way to test the Truth in relationships is to behave the way the other person does for a while, maybe in person or by letter. If the friend is True they will behave True to themselves. If on the other hand this "friend" has been using you on an energetic level to "get you" to fulfil their needs or to dump their responsibilities. Well, then they were unreal, not a friend at all, just a fiction. Just an illusion and a lesson to be learned and thankful for. Everything you experience in life can be used for your betterment as a human being, to enable you to be Truly you. Not some false gathering and bundle of words, borrowed beliefs, thoughtforms and false actions. — A. Antares

The ordinary reality, as I perceive it, is but a huge and intricate virtual screen which operates on multiple levels. Its origins and developments extend far beyond the understanding and scope of the established functioning of the mind. Trapped in the pen of the binary system and the identification with their physical bodies, human beings eat up a fodder made up of sin, guilt and fear, as they watch the soap opera of life being repeated over and over. Yet such a mirage is so insane and unreal that attentive eyes cannot help discovering gaps all over the place. Although the operators at the projector do their best to botch it up, the absurd illusion of this misperception may reveal itself at any moment. It is like a boasting block of ice showing off its solidity as long as the temperature is below zero and yet inevitably starting to thaw and melt away in warmer weather. — Franco Santoro

Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them. — Harry Guntrip

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn't mean, "It's all right. We're going to heaven now." No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn't mean, "So there is a life after death." Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an "end." They are about a beginning. The beginning of God's new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God's "being-in-charge" is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it. — N. T. Wright

Both the biological and psychological approaches are suspect since both posit an unreal world, completely at odds with human experience, in which people do not get depressed for good reasons having to do with their experience in life and their uneasiness about the facts of existence. Rather, people only get depressed because something in them is flawed or broken. Depression of any magnitude, these approaches claim, is always an illness and never a reaction to being dropped, willy-nilly, into a world not of their making, which they are forced to make mean something. — Eric Maisel

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance ... and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families. — Stephen King