Unreality Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Dream, Air, California

  Stella Benson (1922). “The Poor Man”

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• 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

  Reading, Fake, Literature

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.42, Ultramarine Publishing

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• We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.

  Peter Greenaway

  Reality, Needs, Virtual Reality

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• My work would have the impact of my unreality - my doubts.

  Joel-Peter Witkin

  Impact, Doubt

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• In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.

  Bertrand Russell

  Fall, Reality, Errors

  Bertrand Russell (2007). “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, p.170, Spokesman Books

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• [In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

  Margaret Mead

  Long Ago, Movement, Body

  Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead (1942). “Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis”

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

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Reality, Matter, Masters

  "Classics Revisited". Chapter: "Tolstoy: War and Peace", p. 192, 1968.

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• 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

  Vitality, Each Day, World

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• 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

  Love Is, Perception, Shadow

  Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ruth L. C. Simms (2003). “The invention of Morel”, New York Review of Books

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• 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

  Real, Sarcasm, Space

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• 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

  Memories, Heart, Suffering

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• 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

  Attitude, Insane World, Self

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• What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race.

  Amedeo Modigliani

  Reality, Race, Serendipity

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• 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

  Spiritual, Father, Mean

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• 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

  Two, Groups, Fever

  Matt Taibbi (2007). “Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire”, p.46, Black Cat

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• 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

  Next, Emptiness, Reincarnation

  Rudolf Steiner (2001). “Reincarnation and Karma”, p.24, SteinerBooks

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• 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

  Loneliness, Emotional, Self

  Sherry Turkle (1985). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, Touchstone Books

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• Grand Thoughts that never can be wearied out,
  Showing the unreality of Time.

  Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton

  Richard Monckton Milnes (1st baron Houghton.) (1838). “The poems of Richard Monckton Milnes”, p.131

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• One of our priorities when doing "March" is to sort of undo what we feel is the disservice done by what we call the Nine Words Problem. Which is that most American kids, whatever they do learn about the movement, especially in school, is usually limited to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream." And so there's sort of a layer of unreality; there's not a sense of continuity.

  Nate Powell

  Dream, Kings, School

  Source: www.salon.com

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• 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

  Powerful, Believe, Communication

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”, p.27, New York Review of Books

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• 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

  Reality, Differences, Important

  Bertrand Russell (1993). “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, p.168, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  College, Deceit, Fundamentals

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• There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Reality

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.18, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Journey, Vivid, Illness

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.380, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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

  War, Thinking, Europe

  "Ask the Author Live: Philip Gourevitch on Osama Bin Laden". The New Yorker Live Chat, www.newyorker.com. May 4, 2011.

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