Surrealistic Quotes

“Once you reach deeper and deeper into your reality, you approach closer and closer its surreal essence.”
― Talismanist Giebra, Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.

“iti aduc pe brate
puiul d tigru
cu colti tristi, intorsi.
luna rade singura
uitata pe-un horn.
cateodata cainii
au stele
pe cerul gurii.”
― Monica Laura Rapeanu, Orbul de la Cină

“The wind blew through the window. The trousers swayed. Doubtless when they were on Mr. Craggs, the trousers looked splendid and went perfectly well together with his body. But like this, isolated in space, Mr. Cragg's trousers were nightmarish.

The wind blew through the window. As they swayed, the trousers were alive. A shot, truncated, square creature consisting entirely of legs, belly and what went with them. And now it would get down and start walking among people and over people and grow and...”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders & The Fisher of Men

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“Hyperbolic Suggestion is—as one might infer from the term’s literal interpretation—a method of suggestion induced upon the subject (or subjects), in question, through the blatant and immoderate invocation of hyperbole. Simply stated, excessive exaggeration induces a trance upon the recipient, rendering him or her remarkably susceptible to suggestion. Thus, through the use of a multitude of descriptive adjectives and superlatives, neural mechanisms and pathways are overloaded, as canals and bypasses are burrowed into the thick of the gray matter. The dendrites are, through this process, tuned to a predetermined frequency by which the seeds of suggestion can be sown. When this occurs, the subject becomes incredibly compliant to any orders given at a certain tone of voice. In some cases, orders need not be given. The subject’s attitudes might well be so affected by the hyperbole as to affect his natural tendencies...Emmanuel silently wondered if there existed a perfect combination of words or phrases that could somehow—as in the case of Hyperbolic Suggestion—subvert even the most stubborn of wills. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so much the words as it was how they were spoken: if he achieved exactly the most desirable intonation, rhythm, timing, pitch and pronunciation in his speaking, would his verbal appeals somehow make greater inroads in garnering their consent? There had to be some optimal combination of aspirated consonants, diphthongs, facial expressions and inflection he could somehow affect in order to persuade them effectively. But it seemed that to search for this elusive mixture of ingredients would only prove an onerous task, conceivably of little benefit. In view of this sobering reality, he decided instead to try out a completely different approach from those previous: it occurred to him that his attempts at persuasion might be slightly more effective if he carried them out as dialogues, rather than as monologues.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“If the reality makes you unhappy, make yourself happy with the surreal!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Reality will be very boring for those who fall in love with the surreal!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Time melting like a Dali painting”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Letter 19

“The skeleton's lodgings had an ancient head and modern feet. The ceiling was the sky, the floor the earth. It was painted white and decorated with snowballs in which a heart beat. He looked like a transparent monument dreaming of an electric breast, and gazed without eyes, with a pleasant and invisible smile, into the inexhaustible supply of silence that surrounds our star.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Skeleton’s Holiday

“Mermaid Monologue



With tattered tail of a half forgotten root, aiming at the stars she was waving.


From a distance, a Voyager caught a glimpse of her dampen fin.


Neither of them could remember their previous sign.


He thought of guiding her the worldly way.


She used to listen minutely sitting at the bay.


He never realized the way how he turned such a saint.


She never revealed the pangs of her undiluted paint.



Never ever any spaceship returned to bring back the alien.



Neither of them came to know a violin was in play everytime in a different plain.”
― সোনালী চক্রবর্তী

“And then she landed, coming to a momentary rest. Just like that, she was done with the jumping and the skipping and the singing and the shouting and anything else to do with the superpowers that held all that was comprehensible into precarious alignment.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“Private Benjamin lives next door but one to Bob Cryer from The Bill. I once saw him crouching down behind a sycamore tree and using his nose as an Allen Key to release a starving rat.”
― St. John Morris

“Waldo inhaled deeply, staring at the ceiling. It was at times like this that he was at his worst. His mind, while indecisive, was also capable of producing the most detailed, fantastic daydreams imaginable, and with the mysterious disappearance of his grandfather as fodder, his speculations grew even more intense and far-fetched than usual. On the other hand, the logical part of his brain, underdeveloped as it was, went almost entirely untapped in such a situation. Waldo was literally frozen into inaction by his chemical makeup, and this was apparent in the number of cigarettes he lit, the number of sighs he expelled, and the number of times his helpless fingers alternated between nervously tapping the coffee table and running through his unkempt hair.
All that night, Waldo remained awake, deep in unproductive thought, routinely walking back and forth from the living room to the front porch, where he would take a seat in the old-fashioned swing and smoke heavily. The blissful suburban setting, especially on spring nights like this, when the crickets chirped so lustily, and the porch swing creaked so reassuringly in the warm breeze, was perfect for conjuring up bold new fantasies.”
― Donald Jeffries, The Unreals

“Waldo nodded and waved goodbye pathetically, like a young father going off to war.
As soon as the door was closed and he was gone, Jeanne squelched her own apprehensions, opened the paper and read the poem Waldo had written for her:

One taste of Jeanne and out I flew
Wildly, madly, in no direction
But hers, and yet so straight and true
I fly towards her with no protection
It feels so strange to move this way
Though I should land, desire it seems
Moves in strange circles and so I stay
Disoriented beyond my wildest dreams.”
― Donald Jeffries

“No matter how real they are, oases will always look surreal!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Tym zmarłym po śmierci rosły brody i paznokcie tak długie, że poprzebijały ziemię i zarosły całe miasto i ludzie się w tych brodach plątali, i już nie było wiadomo, do czego to będzie prowadzić; ale przyszedł szewczyk Skuba, zabił smoka, pojął za żonę królewnę, a potem zrobił porządek z brodami oraz obóz koncentracyjny dla opornych.”
― Zdzisław Beksiński, Zdzisław Beksiński. Opowiadania

“If young people tell me I'm young at heart, I take offence -- I'm OLD at heart.

Si la gente joven me dice que soy joven de corazón, me ofendo: soy VIEJA de corazón.”
― Leonora Carrington

“My dollhouse has dimmer switches.”
― Bibiana Krall, Quantum-C

“She had poofy, teased-out brown hair that bounced off her shoulders with every high-flying skip and on her t-shirt was a spiraled sun with little wavy lines jumping off it to match the little wavy distortions in the air that were jumping off her. It was pure, unbridled energy and the sound of it hummed in his ears like when standing dangerously near a power transformer. Or maybe he was witnessing the origin story of the world’s first real superhero, and if so, she was probably going to draw her powers from the electromagnetic field itself.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“And then somehow the faint echo of a question brought it all converging in a frightening rush toward the epicenter which was really just another hidden nexus in an infinite web of them. A profusion of warmth followed by a spark that ignited a cloud of impossible color and luminosity—swirling and rippling and churning and strobing—and singing! An excitation in search of that subtle and rhythmic order by which new ensembles were always finding ways to expand the expansionless.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“The blast blew a hole in the smack middle of the strange Utopia vision before him and shook the dust out of the plywood roof which rained down on his head in a barrage of spiraled tendrils. It was through a fit of coughing and ears ringing that Jarvis had returned to himself. Spirit, mind and body reuniting in a Pentecostal collision. Once again, he was immersed in that role he could not seem to escape.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“The whole affair was seemingly a replay of some sentimental act he had dreamed up in his battle-weary mind, half-asleep and half-wired in waiting out the night in the rubble of a compromised safe house halfway across the world. Part of him wondered if this was nothing more than the vivid delusion stretching out the faint but escalating whistle between the click of the enemy gun and the bullet exiting the back of his skull.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“Will they remember this existence?”

“Maybe in the way fragments of forgotten dreams sometimes lightly superimpose themselves in the mind many years later, only to dissolve in a blink.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause