Unreality Quotes

Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness, about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality. (Gerald Durrell)
What has reality shows got to do with reality? It is beyond unreality; there is nothing real about it. View quote
Morley Safer
What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race. View quote
Amedeo Modigliani
[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew. View quote
Margaret Mead
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands? View quote
Emil Cioran
The question of "unreality"is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it. View quote
Albert Camus
The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it. View quote
Allan Sherman
And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together. View quote
Samuel R. Delany
If you're going to establish a certain level of unreality than you have to deal with it. View quote
Bill Sienkiewicz
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. (Charlie Pierce)
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
The highest degree of knowledge. To become a Buddha one has to break through the bondage of sense and personality; to acquire a complete perception of the REAL SELF and learn not to separate it from all otherselves; to learn by experience the utter unreality of all phenomena of the visible Kosmos foremost of all; to reach a complete detachment from all that is evanescent and finite, and live while yet on Earth in the immortal and the everlasting alone, in a supreme state of holiness. View quote
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion. View quote
Emil Cioran
We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality. View quote
Emil Cioran
In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable. View quote
Emil Cioran
But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. View quote
Robert E. Howard
It is no hardship whatever,” said Aillas. "You have never strained at the deed. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and suddenly you find the idea incredible. Do you not sense a taint of unreality? View quote
Jack Vance
Urban folk, dealing as they do in ideas and abstractions, become conditioned to unreality. Then, wherever the fabric of civilization breaks, these people are as helpless as fish out of water. View quote
Jack Vance
The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality. View quote
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Prehistoric images speak to us more evocatively than any other element of the archeological record: colorful, vibrant paintings of horses, of bison, of a panoply of animals and humans that often seem alive and in motion. And yet there is a dimension of unreality about them... The images seem plucked from life... often arranged chaotically to our eye, frequently superimposed... sometimes apparently incomplete. ...There is an enigma in these images, a profound challenge to our understanding of the past. (Richard Leakey)
What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. View quote
Colin Wilson
All is unreality. Nothing is worth discussing, worth desiring. View quote
Yoshida Kenkō
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. View quote
William Faulkner
Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires - this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's fingerprints. View quote
Elizabeth Hardwick