Reality Memory Quotes & Sayings

Built up by the contiguity of the memories that followed one another, the black tunnel, in which my thoughts had been straying so long that they had even ceased to be aware of it, was suddenly broken by an interval of sunlight, allowing me to see in the distance a blue and smiling universe in which Albertine was no more than a memory, unimportant and full of charm. Is it this, I asked myself, that is the true Albertine, or is it indeed the person who, in the darkness through which I have so long been rolling, seemed to me the sole reality? — Marcel Proust

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.' — Tao Lin

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power
and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience. — Barack Obama

INTROSPECTION: LOOKING WITHIN
What is there to say about the inner life? It is as complex as the watery byways of Venice, Delicate as the hands of an infant child, Curious and compact as the wisdom of an acorn. It is as magnificent as the profile of an African queen.
It eludes comprehension and yet it is ever present, Enveloping every moment of life.
One lives from the inside out. A gnarl of emotion, biography, memory, and spirit. Each blending and bending into the other Like knotted strands of crocheted comforter. It is a world I will never truly understand, And yet the only reality I can ever know.
What — Karyn D. Kedar

The first time they slept with each other, she lifted her t-shirt and showed him all her scars. She told him about her first memory. She told him about her hazy childhood. She told him about how she stormed out of her house one night after an argument, ran to the sea, and almost threw herself into the waters. And she told him how she couldn't do it; how just the thought of it brought a fear that was so intense it broke her skin and left her with a feeling of reality she had never felt before. — Vatsal Surti

Whilst your memory is as sharp as the most reliable computer, it is always wiser to write things down. Pre-meditation helps the refining process, taking out the undesirable elements from a dream or vision, even mounting the courage to face and overcome challenges before they appear in reality. — Archibald Marwizi

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. — George Orwell

She is more memory than reality. She belongs to a time of teenage crushes, first kisses, crowded lecture halls and smoky pubs. Even if she had lived, we might have had nothing in common except the past. — Michael Robotham

The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading. — Marcel Proust

But that day it was raining, and since they couldn't very well sit on the rooftop in the rain to watch the flotilla parade, they stayed in the little room that led to the roof. It had just one tiny window through which the gray light of day filtered in. They sat on the floor, and Lorenzo's senses were aroused by the sound of the rain falling outside, the musky smell of his own body, and the fragrant scent of Caterina's hair. A single blonde strand wound down her slim neck.

They kissed, taking off their rain-washed summer clothes so that their bodies pressed, naked, against one another. Long, delicate lovemaking. Caresses, kisses, shivers, and sighs of delight.

Lorenzo would have gladly spend the rest of his life preserved in that single moment, as if in amber, abandoning reality to live in the memory of that one single day. — Riccardo Bruni

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy
that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them. — Mark Twain

Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world's population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video. — Dean Koontz

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve. — Marilynne Robinson

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters. — Robert Penn Warren

That is the beauty of memory, isn't it? Our reality is always clouded by our perceptions of truth. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

There was one world, of flesh and blood and bone, but also another - a deeper reality that ordinary people could glimpse only fleetingly, if at all. A world of souls, both the living and the dead, in which time and space, memory and desire, existed in a purely fluid state, the way they did in dreams. — Justin Cronin

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain. — Arthur Miller

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more. — C.S. Lewis

Life is worthy of the name only when it reflects Reality in action. No university will teach you how to live so that when the time of dying comes, you can say: I lived well I do not need to live again. Most of us die wishing we could live again. So many mistakes committed, so much left undone. Most of the people vegetate, but do not live. They merely gather experience and enrich their memory. But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But the strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep, which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the dream too, might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which every thing is washed away, but that which is new and more substantial even than life: Reality. — Henry Miller

Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer. — Abraham Foxman

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant ... — Alan Lightman

It's what we're all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We're all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We're trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful. — Liza Palmer

This kind of horror has become all too familiar to us. As parents, Cindy and I offer our prayers to the memory of the slain children and ask that God ease the pain of Littleton's suffering families, ... The students of Columbine High School and children everywhere have a basic right to learn in an environment free of fear and violence. We must redouble our efforts to see that this is a reality. — John McCain

But past service counted for little these days. The world, and those who governed it, moved too quickly to be carrying such burdens as memory and gratitude. — Brian Ruckley

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment - ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay - and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins. — Roger Angell

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water. — Eugene Ionesco

If ever I had any doubts about the fundamental realities of religion, they could always be dispelled by one memory- the light upon my father's face as he came back from early communion. — Alfred Noyes

The fact is that one moves through life like someone moving with a lantern in a dark woods. A bit of the path ahead is illuminated, and a bit of the path behind. But the darkness follows hard on one's steps, and envelopes our trails as one proceeds. Were one to be able, as one never is, to retrace the steps by daylight, one would find that the terrain traversed bears, in reality, little relationship to what imagination and memory pictured. We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant. — George F. Kennan

When we let go of our battles and open our heart to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice. Only in this moment can we discover that which is timeless. Only here can we find the love that we seek. Love in the past is simply memory, and love in the future is fantasy. Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world. — Jack Kornfield

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. — John Fowles

Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity ... the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale. — Jack Kornfield

Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies ... — Eileen Chang

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire. — John Dewey

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off - though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be - but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and being to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories. — Donna Tartt

Art - the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory. — Lawrence Durrell

Time can move quickly when it loses its memory, or when there are no new memories to create. Reality's vulture flies down and picks at the bones of our dreams. — John Dolan

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help. — Milan Kundera

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don't somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can't fish. — Ted Hughes

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge
dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be. — Mark Helprin

The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks. — Shireen Jeejeebhoy

What if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don't ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further. It's more of a theoretical afterlife. If that's true, all of these theoretical afterlives of people could potentially interact or network. That space seems way more powerful and exciting than reality. This potential boundlessness is more of what god is to me. — Blake Butler

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short. — Frank Herbert

What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace
and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now. — Eckhart Tolle

Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory. — Hilaire Belloc

Worry is different from fear. If fear is like a raging fever, worry is a low-grade temperature. It nags at us, simmers in our souls, hovers in the back of our minds like a faint memory. We may fear certain realities, like death; we worry about vague possibilities. Worry distracts us more than paralyzes us. It is like a leaky faucet we never get around to fixing. — Gerald Lawson Sittser

The Secoya are trapped between the devastating effects of the colonization frontier and their rich traditional past, which is proving to be as fragile a reality and as fleeting a memory as the most powerful visions of their esoteric science. But instead of detailing that sad scene, in this chapter I have attempted to portray my image of this culture as I see it in its fading colors, magic, and awe-inspiring mystery. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

User experience is really the whole totality. Opening the package good example. It's the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse all sorts of incidental things. — Donald A. Norman

I'm obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show. — Jenny Hval

What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse. — Renee Fredrickson

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. — Cormac McCarthy

The symptomatology of PTSD.
In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition. — Babette Rothschild

You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you're looking for, but - " a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head - "in here. That's what I'm for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barrier around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also. — Thomas Pynchon

I could produce innumerable instances from my own memory and observation, of events imputed to the profound skill and address of a minister, which, in reality, were either mere effects of negligence, weakness, humour, passion, or pride, or, at best, but the natural course of things left to themselves.Swift'sThoughts on the present Posture of Affairs.5. Manner — Samuel Johnson

The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. — Marcel Proust

Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness. — Rachel Held Evans

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own. — Salman Rushdie

What the History is really about lies behind this: man, giant-sized, seen against the background of the entire world, universalized in his conflict with destiny, the gods, and the cosmic order. The medium that is most fertile in showing the true nature of reality is the human mind, remembering, reflective, and fertile most of all when its memory and reflection are put at the service of its dreaming and fantastic side. — Herodotus

In travelling where novelties of all kinds press in upon us, mental food is often supplied so rapidly from without that there is no time for digestion. We regret that the quickly shifting impressions can leave no permanent imprint. In reality, however, it is with this as it is with reading. How often we regret not being able to retain in the memory one-thousandth part of what is read ! It is comforting in both cases to know that the seen as well as the read has made a mental impression before it is forgotten, and thus forms the mind and nourishes it, while that which is retained in the memory merely fills and swells the hollow of the head with matter which remains ever foreign to it, because it has not been absorbed, and therefore the recipient can be as empty as before. — Arthur Schopenhauer

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. — Cormac McCarthy

Maybe she was enjoying a moment in her life, a sliver of light, a flash memory of one of her kids, something sweet and approaching reality. — Miriam Toews

I love the combination of smartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodern trashiness in this book: a version of the erotic full of nervous tension which animates the sensuality, and also Zimroth's feeling for words, compressed, ironic, withholding, but also 'asking for it ... the siege, the thrill, the battle fatigue.' A profoundly urban book, of harsh memory and fantasy, set in harsher reality. — Alicia Ostriker

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory. — Marcel Proust

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

Sometimes the memory of someone is better than the reality of them. — Steve Maraboli

There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.

When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm. — Paul Wilson

When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235) — Victoria Moran

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. — Marcel Proust

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one's first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality. — Shatrujeet Nath

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality — Chuck Klosterman

In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings But my encounters with the 'other' reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. — Carl Jung

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours. — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Man knows, and in the course of years he comes to know it increasingly well, feeling it ever more acutely, that memory is weak and fleeting, and if he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does. This is when it seems everyone wants to write a book. Singers and football players, politicians and millionaires. And if they themselves do not know how, or else lack the time, they commission someone else to do it for them ... engendering this reality is the impression of writing as a simple pursuit, though those who subscribe to that view might do well to ponder Thomas Mann's observation that, 'a writer is a man for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others — Ryszard Kapuscinski

There's nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky. Think if one could fully remember perfume or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! — Aldous Huxley

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. — C.S. Lewis

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', — George Orwell

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor ... . Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281). — Minor White

But that's what dreams are for - to weave reality and fantasy and memory and stitch together something you can't hope for in waking life. To fulfill that little part of you that wants something so bad. — Kelley Armstrong

You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever? — Jean Thompson

In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister's absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. — Anthony Marra

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality. — Andre Breton

In the wake of World War I, however, the British and French took out their imperial pens and carved up what remained of the Ottoman dynastic empire, and created an assortment of nation-states in the Middle East modeled along their own. The borders of these new states consisted of neat polygons - with right angles that were always in sharp contrast to the chaotic reality on the ground. In the Middle East, modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and the various Persian Gulf oil states all traced their shapes and origins back to this process; even most of their names were imposed by outsiders. In other words, many of the states in the Middle East today - Egypt being the most notable exception - were not willed into existence by their own people or developed organically out of a common historical memory or — Thomas L. Friedman

For years I'd been trying to forget ... , locking it up and burying it deep in my memory. The journey ... had shattered that, bringing it all back - but now that I'd faced it, I found to my surprise that the fear had been worse than the reality. — Benedict Jacka

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. — Haruki Murakami

The memories: they are the reality. — Stephen King

Now, since the self is constantly thinking numerous things, since it is nothing more than the thoughts of these things, when by chance, instead of having them as the objects of its attention, it suddenly turns its thoughts upon itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something unfamiliar, to which, in order to give it some reality - it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror. — Marcel Proust

For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch. We can, for example, imagine the path of a bird through the sky as a distinct line which it has taken. But this line is as abstract as a line of latitude. In concrete reality, the bird left no line, and, similarly, the past from which our ego is abstracted has entirely disappeared. Thus any attempt to cling to the ego or to make it an effective source of action is doomed to frustration. — Alan W. Watts

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. — Richard K. Morgan

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Vision is the best manifestation of creative imagination and the primary motivation of human action. It's the ability to see beyond our present reality, to create, to invent what does not yet exist, to become what we not yet are. It gives us capacity to live out of our imagination instead of our memory. — Stephen R. Covey

It is out of reality that the most peculiar tale of all is born ... Some call me the Elder Granny, others - the Dryad, but my real name is Memory. It is I who sits on a tree that keeps on growing, and growing, it is I who reminisces and tells stories. — Hans Christian Andersen

Internal and external world is interdependent. Your experiences and impressions of the outside world shape your thoughts and imagination, while making the choice and decisions, from your internal thought process, creates your physical reality. — Roshan Sharma

And truths, these days, are spoken
The same way promises are made,
With gritted teeth and crossed fingers. — Sanhita Baruah

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. — Haruki Murakami

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language. — Siri Hustvedt

Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was - to strip it all bare and start from scratch, as it were. In his nearly 250 years of life and, now, as an old emaciated man completely estranged from his family and closest friends - albeit more by circumstance than by choice - he understood the importance of this process and revered it, for there were far greater things to be done and achieved in the dark, uncertain areas of existence than in those circumscribed - and thereby strained - by comprehensibility. — Ashim Shanker

She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true. — Gustave Flaubert