Unreality Quotes

“Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if the sun shines brightly upon your skin every day, if you do not believe in the sunlight, the sunlight for you does not exist.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”
― Terence McKenna

“Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“The line between insanity and mysticism is thin; the line between reality and unreality is thin. Liminality as a spiritual concept is all about the porousness of boundaries.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. (“The Disinheritors”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“She lived in the dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality; he did not know. In any case, he loved her as she was. It might never be used, but it would give her pleasure to have it.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach

“For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I was in doubt, and then everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do; and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it's hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“There is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb and Other Tales

“I was dizzy in that room. I felt faint with disbelief. I held on to the seat of my chair to stay upright. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t absorb any of it.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.

The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?”
― Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

“She and the victim seemed alone in a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“A cloud of unreality hangs about men, events, discourses, purposes.”
― Joseph Conrad

“When a beautiful reality looks unreal, you will realize that the beauty of reality is superior to any dream whatsoever!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“It's like Charlie's dreamed everything he lived through here.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“They have a long life, dreams. I have dreams now which I had as a young girl. They have an odd durability for something not quite real."
"Do you think they mean anything?"
She looked surprised. "Oh yes," she said. "Dont you?"
"Well. I dont know. They're in your head."
She smiled again. "I suppose I dont consider that to be the condemnation you do.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“He felt removed from reality.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Il y a des personnages qui sentent que leurs sens les séparent du réel, de l'être. Ce sens en eux infecte les autres sens.”
― Paul Valéry

“It was the moment of shadow, of half-real things.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Sword and Sorceress II

“...far from Cardan, everything has taken on a tinge of unreality, and I worry that somehow the curse was never broken, that all this is the fantasy of a feverish mind.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“The church, prime minister, has grown so accustomed to eternal answers that I can’t imagine it giving any other kind, Even if reality contradicts them, We’ve done nothing but contradict reality from the outset, and yet we’re still here,”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“The simulated perfection that surrounds us is mediated by screens. On every screen we look at it, perfection stares out at us. Screens are everywhere. We are always staring at screens. Cinema screens, TV screens, iPhone screens, computer screens… Screens are omnipresent in our lives. And they are the delivery mechanisms of perfect images of perfect lives. Celebrities, the nobility and the super rich are those with the perfect lives we so envy. They rule the screens.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Hypersex

“Truth, when forged in the fires of emotions, can swell and loom over Fact likes a veil of impenetrable mithril, allowing the unreal to seem more plausible, more desirable, and over time, shift all into a new shared and accepted, albeit fictitious, paradigm.”
― Ronald P. Vincent, The Joyful Guide To Lachrymology

“When unreality is the very basis of your existence, there cannot be a stronger drive than to uphold it at all costs, even and especially at the expense of confronting naked truth.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause