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You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
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Dr. Seuss
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Reality continues to ruin my life.
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Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)
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When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.
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Jess C. Scott (The Intern)
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It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
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Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
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Albert Einstein
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Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.
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Lloyd Alexander
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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?
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John Lennon
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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
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Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You)
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It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.
β
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Bill Watterson
β
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life)
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We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
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Philip K. Dick (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon)
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You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
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Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary (Malcolm X Speeches and Writings) (Malcolm X Speeches & Writings))
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Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
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Lao Tzu
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It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.
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Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
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A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (Fanshawe)
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Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.
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Nora Ephron
β
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.
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Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)
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A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
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John Lennon
β
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
β"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64
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Albert Einstein
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Thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.
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Michelle Hodkin (The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #1))
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One person's craziness is another person's reality.
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Tim Burton
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We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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AnaΓ―s Nin (Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of AnaΓ―s Nin, 1932-1934)
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Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.
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Alex Haley
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Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
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Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1))
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The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
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Rachel Carson
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The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
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β
Jim Morrison
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I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.
β
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Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1))
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The real world is where the monsters are.
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Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
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Please believe that one single positive dream is more important than a thousand negative realities.
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Adeline Yen Mah (Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter)
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To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.
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Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
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SΓΈren Kierkegaard
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Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
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Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
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The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
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Tom Clancy
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Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...
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Eileen Chang
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Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
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Edgar Allan Poe
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We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It's time to put an end to this. It's time for us to let ourselves be loved.
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C. JoyBell C.
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Don't let the expectations and opinions of other people affect your decisions. It's your life, not theirs. Do what matters most to you; do what makes you feel alive and happy. Don't let the expectations and ideas of others limit who you are. If you let others tell you who you are, you are living their reality β not yours. There is more to life than pleasing people. There is much more to life than following others' prescribed path. There is so much more to life than what you experience right now. You need to decide who you are for yourself. Become a whole being. Adventure.
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Roy T. Bennett
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Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.
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Bertolt Brecht
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I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
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Lewis Carroll
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Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
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John Lennon
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If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.
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Lev Grossman (The Magicians (The Magicians, #1))
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You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but thatβs bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if theyβre afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But theyβre wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. Itβs all in how you carry it. Thatβs what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, youβre letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
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Jim Morrison
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Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!
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Bob Marley
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?
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Edgar Rice Burroughs (The Return of Tarzan (Tarzan, #2))
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Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
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George Orwell (1984)
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Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2))
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Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.
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Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
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And Iβd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, Iβd find you and Iβd choose you.
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Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
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Funny, when you finally faced reality, it was amazing how clearly you could see things.
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Mary Higgins Clark (Loves Music, Loves to Dance)
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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Jessamyn West
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The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.
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Jean Shepherd
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No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
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Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)
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I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.
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Lewis Carroll
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Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.
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Richelle Mead (Spirit Bound (Vampire Academy, #5))
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
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Dr. Seuss
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A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
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Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)
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If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
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Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
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We suffer more often in imagination than in reality
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Seneca
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When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
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Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies)
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Invisible things are the only realities.
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Edgar Allan Poe (Loss of Breath)
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I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.
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Groucho Marx
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Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.
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Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
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Always remember, your focus determines your reality.
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George Lucas
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You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. Youβll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. Sheβs the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? Thatβs the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.
Sheβs the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because sheβs kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the authorβs making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyceβs Ulysses sheβs just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
Itβs easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, sheβs going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. Sheβll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time sheβs sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasnβt burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then youβre better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.
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Rosemarie Urquico
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People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What Iβve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders oneβs reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person oneβs master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that personβs view requires to be fakedβ¦The man who lies to the world, is the worldβs slave from then onβ¦There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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Girls are like apples...the best ones are at the top of the trees. The boys don't want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples that are on the ground that aren't as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think there is something wrong with them, when, in reality, they are amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who's brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree...
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Pete Wentz
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Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.
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Criss Jami (Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality)
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nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
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Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez
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People say that what weβre all seeking is a meaning for life. I donβt think thatβs what weβre really seeking. I think that what weβre seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
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Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)
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I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you
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Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
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1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.
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Miguel Ruiz
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If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
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Socrates
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La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."
("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")
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Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)
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Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.
First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.
Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.
Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
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A fit, healthy bodyβthat is the best fashion statement
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Jess C. Scott
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I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. Itβs okay if you have to leave us. Itβs okay if you want to stop fighting.
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Gayle Forman (If I Stay (If I Stay, #1))
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The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
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Robertson Davies (Tempest-Tost (Salterton Trilogy, #1))
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Harry Potter isnβt real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I donβt know who you are or what your name is or where youβre from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potterβs real and youβre not.
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John Green
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Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.
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Tom Robbins
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If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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You don't have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is.
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Red Haircrow
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The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
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Alan W. Watts
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Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.
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Karen Marie Moning
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The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.
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George R.R. Martin
β
make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.
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Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
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And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
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Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
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Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
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Nora Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman)
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If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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David Foster Wallace (Up, Simba!)
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In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
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β
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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Love is . . . Being happy for the other person when they are happy, Being sad for the person when they are sad, Being together in good times, And being together in bad times.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF STRENGTH.
Love is . . . Being honest with yourself at all times, Being honest with the other person at all times, Telling, listening, respecting the truth, And never pretending.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF REALITY.
Love is . . . An understanding so complete that you feel as if you are a part of the other person, Accepting the other person just the way they are, And not trying to change them to be something else.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF UNITY.
Love is . . . The freedom to pursue your own desires while sharing your experiences with the other person, The growth of one individual alongside of and together with the growth of another individual.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SUCCESS.
Love is . . . The excitement of planning things together, The excitement of doing things together.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF THE FUTURE.
Love is . . . The fury of the storm, The calm in the rainbow.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF PASSION.
Love is . . . Giving and taking in a daily situation, Being patient with each other's needs and desires.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SHARING.
Love is . . . Knowing that the other person will always be with you regardless of what happens, Missing the other person when they are away but remaining near in heart at all times.
LOVE IS THE SOURCE OF SECURITY.
LOVE IS . . . THE SOURCE OF LIFE!
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Susan Polis Schutz
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Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.
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Philip K. Dick
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When Great Trees Fall
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
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Maya Angelou
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I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.
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Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)