Unreality Quotes

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Mind, Chaos, Absurd

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• 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

  Eye, Air, Way

  "What in the Hell Do They Think Is Causing It?". Interview with John Dickerson, www.slate.com. December 8, 2009.

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• Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances.

  Grant Morrison

  Reality, Distinction, Circumstances

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• Human kind cannot bear much reality.

  T. S. Eliot

  Reality, Humanity, Bears

  "In Light of India". Book by Octavio Paz, Chapter 1, www.nytimes.com. 1995.

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• The only thing you fear is the unreality that you yourself have invented.

  Byron Katie

  Twitter post from Jan 02, 2017

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• What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

  Stephen King

  Depression, Reality, Glasses

  Stephen King (2016). “Four Past Midnight”, p.301, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Dream, Memories, Moving

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• 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

  Reality, America, Doe

  Gertrude Stein (1974). “How Writing Is Written”

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• The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it.

  Allan Sherman

  Reality, Differences, Littles

  Allan Sherman (1965). “A gift of laughter: the autobiography of Allan Sherman”

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

  Morley Safer

  Real, Shows, Reality

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• For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Reality, Rocks, Wings

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “(The Great Gatsby)”, p.59, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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• 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

  Kings, Hero, Boys

  Ernst Toller (1934). “I was a German: the autobiography of Ernst Toller”

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• The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

  Toni Cade Bambara

  Dream, Real, Failure

  Toni Cade Bambara (2011). “The Salt Eaters”, p.126, Vintage

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• But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

  Robert E. Howard

  Writing, Men, Ideas

  Robert E. Howard (2007). “The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: Volume 1: The Shadow Kingdom”, p.15, Del Rey

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• 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

  Dream, Country, War

  Daniel J. Boorstin (1962). “The Image or What Happened to the American Dream”

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• For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Essentials, Sociology

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.155, Diversion Books

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• If you're going to establish a certain level of unreality than you have to deal with it

  Bill Sienkiewicz

  Levels, Certain, Deals

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• May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.

  Lewis Carroll

  Dream, Sleep, Insanity

  Lewis Carroll, Edward Wakeling (1994). “Lewis Carroll's Diaries: Containing Journal 4, January to December 1856”

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• Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.

  Protagoras

  Reality, Men, Atheism

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• Fantasy consists in a morbid fascination with unrealities, which secretly transforms itself into a desire to make them real. Imagination is a form of intellectual control, which presents us with the image of unrealities in order that we should understand and feel distanced from them. In imagination we dominate; in fantasy, we are dominated.

  Roger Scruton

  Real, Order, Imagination

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• My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.

  Anna Kavan

  Confused, Ideas, Mind

  Anna Kavan, Brian Wilson Aldiss (1990). “My madness: the selected writings of Anna Kavan”

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

  Al Gore

  Reality, America, United States

  "An interview with accidental movie star Al Gore". Interview with David Roberts, grist.org. May 10, 2006.

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• There should be painless progression, attended by life and peace....Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God....Dropping their present beliefs, they will recognize harmony and as the spiritual reality and discord as the material unreality. Chapter VII pp. 224 and 228 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

  Mary Baker Eddy

  Spiritual, Reality, Keys

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• In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

  Al Gore

  Believe, Thinking, America

  "An interview with accidental movie star Al Gore". Interview with David Roberts, grist.org. May 10, 2006.

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• 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

  Reality, Sick, Growth

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