Quotes & Sayings About Unreality

It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here. — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

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

No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her. — Scott Spencer

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world. — Raheel Farooq

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

On a waiter's check pad," said Slartibartfast, "reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters. — Douglas Adams

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up. — Jeanette Winterson

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

The stripping away of illusion and the struggle to find personal reality can be likened to the peeling of an apple. As one peels away the layers of unreality ... eventually only the core remains. — Meredith L. Young-Sowers

In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. — Al Gore

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew. It really wearied him. He talked to barmaids, to almost any woman, but there was that dark, strained look in his eyes, as if he were hunting something.
Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. — D.H. Lawrence

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

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

How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. — Donna Tartt

The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it. — Allan Sherman

We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality. — Peter Greenaway

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

What has reality shows got to do with reality? It is beyond unreality; there is nothing real about it. — Morley Safer

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

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

I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly reality. — Harold Brodkey

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

If you're going to establish a certain level of unreality than you have to deal with it. — Bill Sienkiewicz

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

Um, yeah, it's one of the things that you kind of have to accept at the very beginning, like I'm not going to try and be super [deep?] factor and no, I can only do it this way, because that's just not how this film's going to work. Like it's got to be sort of a mesh of reality and complete unreality and you kind of have to accept that and go with it. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

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

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

Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me and I don't know how to speak - reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier. — Clarice Lispector

I'm more convinced each day of the complete unreality of the material world and the supreme vitality of the invisible world of spirit. — Paul Russo

Grand Thoughts that never can be wearied out,
Showing the unreality of Time. — Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton

Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. — Elizabeth Hardwick

It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

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

For the first time in his life he was unable to think of himself as existing the next day. There would be a Eustace, he supposed, but it would be someone else, someone to whom things happened that he, the Eustace of to-night, knew nothing about. Already he he felt he had taken leave of the present. For a while he thought it strange that they should all talk to him about ordinary things in ordinary voices; and once when Minney referred to a new pair of sand-shoes he was to have next week he felt a shock of unreality, as though she had suggested taking a train that had long since gone. — L.P. Hartley

He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house — F Scott Fitzgerald

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

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. — Virginia Woolf

This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that. — Kurt Vonnegut

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near. — Emily Bronte

Thoughts are phantoms. And when you fight with phantoms they always win. — Marty Rubin

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it. — Michael Cunningham

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

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, — William Faulkner

Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters. — Kenneth Rexroth

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality. — Jorge Luis Borges

As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot's poems a bird sings, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." I've always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

We 'rid ourselves of conceptual thought' when, by persistent observation, we recognize the unreality of our self-centered thoughts. Then we can remain dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by them. That does not mean to be a cold person. Rather, it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances. — Joko Beck

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

IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them. — Stafford Beer

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter - professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space - was treated with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, loved - was deemed somehow peripheral. — Richard Flanagan

Pure suffering has a consciousness, a tongue, a heart all its own and even the memory of it is but a pale unreality when compared with the actual experience. — Mike Mason

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

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

In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases. — David Pietrusza

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth. — M. Scott Peck

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They — C.S. Lewis

The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary. — Madeline Claire Franklin

Secrets always tend towards a domino effect, dividing and mutating and acquiring as they multiply the force of irresistible momentum. One soon learns to live in the reality of the alternative unreality of one's making. — Panayotis Cacoyannis

Balaam's ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief. — Os Guinness

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

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth. — Jean Cocteau

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything. — Natalie Goldberg

What did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire, the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitary road, this quite solitary road, along which on went rather puzzled, rather tired ... — H.G.Wells

unreality is a condition of life. — Andrei Bitov

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

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew
the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight.
Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. — E. E. Cummings

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

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 was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas — Michel Faber

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

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

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

Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification. The abstraction of the 'spectacle' was never irrevocable, even for the Situationists. Whereas unconditional realization is irrevocable, since we are no longer either alienated or dispossessed: we are in possession of all the information. We are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are, in fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with which the horrors of alienation were very small beer. — Jean Baudrillard

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors") — Richard Matheson

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

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

Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances. — Grant Morrison

It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism. — George MacDonald

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 IS THE HALLMARK of narcissism. Whether it's idealizations, expectations of perfection, manufactured images, illusions, distortions of fact, catastrophizing or other kinds of exaggerations, denial, or outright lying, Narcissists will go to great lengths to avoid any reality that evokes shame and to promote fanatasies that sustain their grandiosity and omnipotence. They require accomplices for this, people to admire them and do their bidding, — Sandy Hotchkiss

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men. — Thomas Merton

A well put together unreality is pretty hard to beat. — Mark Twain

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

I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality. — Philip Gourevitch

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

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

She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it. — Nevil Shute

I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into - what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name ... — Octavio Paz

Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair. — Catherine Lacey

As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity. — Ernst Toller

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

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

Leave us some unreality. Do not make us too offensively sane. — Oscar Wilde

Why do photographers photograph? To make unreality visible. — Bill Jay