"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
— Albert Einstein

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"
— John Lennon

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
— Jessamyn West

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
— John Lennon

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs."
— Robin P. Williams

"It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"Nothing is real."
— John Lennon (Beatles Lyrics)

"What happened to happily ever after?

Reality killed it."
— Kenzie

"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities."
— Maya Angelou

"The real world is where the monsters are."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."
— Clive Barker

"...I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone."
— Shannon Hale (Book of a Thousand Days)

"We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN."
— B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)

"There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice. "
— Mitch Albom (For One More Day)

"Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced."
— John Keats

"The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."
— Harry G. Frankfurt (On Bullshit)

"When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more."
— C.S. Lewis

"Reality, however Utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays."
— Aldous Huxley

"Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing."
— William S. Burroughs (Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts)

"The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively."
— Niels Bohr

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it."
— Kyoichi Katayama

"Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. "
— Edward W. Said

"...it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over."
— Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes: Stories)

"Nobody speaks the truth when there s something they must have."
— Dunno

"To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear."
— Avital Ronell

"there isn't a slightest wound that doesn't hurt in the heart.
"
— Sandra Pulido

"Doffing the ego's
safe glory, he finds
his naked reality."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"The first million words are the hardest."
— Francis Hamit (Virtual Reality and the Exploration of Cyberspace/Book and Disk)

"Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.

This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead."
— Jeffrey A. Lockwood

"Amor es gozar mucho y llorar luego mucho más."
— Sappho

"The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Not many people know what absolute reality is. Maybe it’s what we see now, everyday. Maybe it’s the world in our minds or our imaginations. Maybe the knowledge we gather is the absolute reality.
Our minds show us many things, but it can also hide things from us."
— Hanah (taken from a work-in-progress story)