#real

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#meaning #memory #reality #life

Latent brain functions can be enabled by force majeure when we are facing the weirdness of an unknown reality. ↗

— Toba Beta

#force-majeure #latent #life #reality #secret

… because I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that covers the sun... ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#fantasy #reality #shadow #time #dreams

Why would our brains have this capacity to sense the oneness of the universe, a sense that can be induced in many ways, even technological, if that capacity did not reflect an external reality? ↗

— Kara Dalkey

#perception #reality #universe #life

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain? ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#life #mountain #perception #reality #stone

I have been seeing dragons again. Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail; his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe. They are not richly bright but muted like dawns or the vague sheen on a fly's wing. Their old flesh drags in folds as they drop into grey pools, strain behind a tree. Finally the others saw one today, trapped, tangled in our badminton net. The minute eyes shuddered deep in the creased face while his throat, strangely fierce, stretched to release an extinct burning inside: pathetic loud whispers as four of us and the excited spaniel surrounded him. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#humour #magic-realism #mythical-beasts #life

The natural world is the only reality, thus the only valid base for spirituality there is. ↗

— David Petersen

#life

Success is realising the true joy and wonder of life can only be yours if you follow your own intuition, aiming to achieve your bliss. ↗

— Steven Redhead

#bliss #intuition #joy #life #realising

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). ↗

— Julio Cortázar

#reality #life

Neither I nor the four flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal ocean have been able to solve the riddle of life. ↗

— Comte de Lautréamont

#poetry #surreal #surrealism #life