#reality

Should she stick with the nice, sensitive guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawk)? Winona made the kind of romantic decision most people my age would have made in 1994: She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing, and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#age

Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm. ↗

— Jonathan Shay

#pride #reality #war #courage

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#reality #death

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking. ↗

— Angela Carter

#dream #life #reality #sleeping #waking

Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function. ↗

— Theodore Sturgeon

#reality #design

In response to those who say to stop dreaming and face reality, I say keep dreaming and make reality. ↗

— Kristian Kan

#inspiration #perserverance #reality #dreams

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#dreams #happy #nightmares #reality #soldier

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare. ↗

— Arthur Machen

#horror #moon #reality #space #stars

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own. ↗

— Jens Peter Jacobsen

#life #reality #beauty

Don't let other people's opinions distort your reality. Be true to yourself. Be bold in pursuing your dreams. Be unapologetically you! ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#be-yourself #dreams #happiness #love #opinions