“
I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Melissa Bank (The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing)
“
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
”
”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“
Top Gun,” I whispered to Lindsey. We’d started pointing out Luc’s ubiquitous pop culture references, having decided that because he cut his fangs in the Wild West, he’d been entranced by movies and television. You know, because living in a society of magically enhanced vampires didn’t require enough willing suspension of disbelief.
-Merit in Chloe Neill’s Friday Night Bites
”
”
Chloe Neill (Friday Night Bites (Chicagoland Vampires, #2))
“
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith
”
”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“
Somehow I could lose myself in the ocean the same way I could lose myself in a good book. Maybe it was because both involved suspension--a suspension of weight, a suspension of disbelief--a willingness to surrender to something greater than oneself.
”
”
Eve Marie Mont (A Breath of Eyre (Unbound, #1))
“
Harry's suspension of disbelief blew completely out the window.
You're giving me a time machine to treat my sleep disorder.
You're giving me a TIME MACHINE to treat my SLEEP DISORDER.
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
"Ehehehehhheheh..." Harry's mouth said. He was now holding the necklace away from him as though it were a live bomb. Well, no, not as if it were a live bomb, that didn't begin to describe the severity of the situation. Harry held the necklace away from him as though it were a time machine.
”
”
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)
“
But the suspension of disbelief could only go so far.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy)
“
I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
”
”
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
“
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
”
”
John Granger
“
A wish is many things. It is hope and desire and daydreams. It is impossibility and improbability and something in between. It is stardust and well water and spectrums of light in the sky. It is half-melted birthday candles and Christmas lists. It is broken turkey bones, It is the willing suspension of disbelief.
And sometimes it is desperation. It is a hole in your heart that wants filling. It is more-than-anything-in-the-world.
”
”
John David Anderson (Granted)
“
..Well, old dear, I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Melissa Bank (The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing)
“
It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Dan Chaon (Sleepwalk)
“
He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches, the strength religion gave so many people . . . and yet, for him, the one intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to "believe" had always proved too big an obstacle for his academic mind. "I want to believe," he heard himself say.
”
”
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
“
Damn," Crystal sputtered, looking up from the dictionary in disbelief. "Oenophlygia: the state of being dunk. It really is a word".
Johnny gloated unabashedly. "Just wouldn't listen, would you? Just couldn't stand that I might be way ahead of the game. Word to the wise," he added with a superior smirk. "Don't mess with a man of my experience in that arena.
”
”
Cindy Gerard (Risk No Secrets (Black Ops Inc., #5))
“
...the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
When it comes to creating compelling fiction, the devil may be in the details, but it is your imagination that ultimately allows your work to spread its wings and take flight. And fly it must. Only by soaring above the clouds of doubt can one truly achieve a suspension of disbelief
”
”
Max Hawthorne (Kronos Rising (Kronos Rising #1))
“
We may exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we may quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to become, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'...which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our own.
”
”
Wayne C. Booth
“
Charlie Munger gave me a great quotation on this subject, from Demosthenes: “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” The belief that some fundamental limiter is no longer valid—and thus historic notions of fair value no longer matter—is invariably at the core of every bubble and consequent crash. In fiction, willing suspension of disbelief adds to our enjoyment.
”
”
Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Barbara W. Tuchman (Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour)
“
MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!
AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.
MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.
AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!
”
”
Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)
“
This was one of those odd thoughts that came out of the blue and struck me as both clever and logical. Hot chocolate wouldn’t be something desert people would naturally gravitate toward. (There are cold deserts, of course, but with two suns I always assumed Tatooine is mostly pretty warm. Now, of course, the Star Wars Essential Atlas and other official material backs up that assumption.) I also caught way more grief for this than I ever expected. Quite a few people took me to task for putting an Earth-based drink into the Star Wars universe. Of course, those same people apparently weren’t bothered by the Millennium Falcon, or lightsabers. It was, though, a reminder that you never know what word or image might jolt someone out of their suspension of disbelief. Anyway, why would anyone want to live in that Galaxy Far, Far Away if they don’t have chocolate? Inconceivable …
”
”
Timothy Zahn (Star Wars: Heir to the Empire)
“
Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief,
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Mercy)
“
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief'. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.
”
”
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays)
“
The Court was run according to the suspension of disbelief: every person in the courtroom knew but also did not know that there was a great deal of artifice surrounding matters that were nonetheless predicated on authenticity.
”
”
Katie Kitamura (Intimacies)
“
To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
That's the way to tour Disneyland, with a complete suspension of disbelief, with a drunken sense of joy and eyes wide with wonder. Let the child inside you come out and play. Laugh and shout! Plunge into the mind and soul of Walt Disney.
---Ray Bradbury
”
”
Jim Denney (Walt's Disneyland: It's Still There If You Know Where to Look)
“
To live with someone for a long time requires an element of fiction – the selective use of facts to craft an ongoing story. Also the suspension of disbelief: we must believe a story is real while we are in it, and the same goes, Tess thinks, for a marriage.
”
”
Anna Funder (The Girl with the Dogs: Penguin Special)
“
evidently there was such a thing as “the childhood best friends law,” by which any relationship involving two such individuals was immediately forgiven regardless of circumstance and then romanticized beyond any reasonable human being’s suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Alice Keats
“
When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order to simply move forward through their days. If that suspension faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was everywhere--in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and pencils--well you would fly for the first nest in a tree, run flat-out for the first burrow you saw.
”
”
Erica Bauermeister (Joy for Beginners)
“
Found footage pulls the audience—those watching and those reading—into a world that’s their world, and that closeness, that immediate recognition of almost everything they see or read about, simplifies, at least for a while, the transitioning to the perfect state of suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Andrew Cull (Found: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Stories)
“
MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what’s the alternative? Usually there is none.
”
”
Paul Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar)
“
Yanko allowed me to enter a world strange and fanciful. Although I had to cope daily with real and mundane matters, I found that some of the magic of his world stayed around my shoulders.
”
”
Maya Angelou (Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #3))
“
The fantastic is in complicity with the realist model, in the claims that realism makes to represent the true face of reality. It points to the gaps and inadequacies of realism, but does not question the legitimacy of its claims to represent reality. The concept of “suspension of disbelief', that beloved criterion of positivist criticism supposedly serving to establish the legitimacy of the fantastic, confirms this hegemony.
”
”
Michael Richardson (Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World)
“
The tenuous but precise way in which Le Fanu builds up the supernatural elements is akin to the pervasive effects of mildew on a solid wall. It is not by force but by accumulation that he demolishes disbelief and tears down the barrier that separates us from fear.
”
”
Guillermo del Toro (The Haunting of Hill House)
“
What did you tell me, Jesse? Sure Jake, Stephanie will do exactly what you tell her. Sure Jake, protecting her will be a piece of cake. “
Snorting in disbelief, he added, “Being at war is safer compared to this shit, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than looking after your girlfriend.
”
”
Nina D'Angelo (Nowhere to Run (Stephanie Carovella #1))
“
The ability to question alongside someone else is a form of “intellectual empathy.” When we have it, we imaginatively enter into how another person is looking at the world. We go beyond the willing suspension of disbelief to momentarily granting premises and commitments that we might otherwise reject to see how their framework holds together—if the whole framework holds together—and to discern how to respond in light of that. Intellectual empathy is a form of seeing how. As in, “Oh, I see how you could think that. It’s wrong, but I can see how it might make sense.” Or as in, “Oh, I see how you’re thinking there. That’s wrong for the following seventeen reasons!” Or, “Yes, that does make sense. That’s a good point.” It is an act that is aimed first toward the good of understanding, a good that persuasion may flow from but can never precede.
”
”
Matthew Lee Anderson (The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith)
“
here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo sapiens for (let us not quarrel about the exact total) at least one hundred and fifty thousand years. An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then—and only in the last six thousand years at the very least—decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. . . . Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks. It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
Death shall reign bliss over the abyss to those who fear the end. All those who are dying will travel only once through the desolate. Dim it will be for the souls in gray, not ready to evanesce from this world. Grief will cling to ice, limbs will stiffen as timber, voices will go unheard through a death rattle, and our minds will turn into eternal shadow. All of the love you carry will stand on a thread of pinhole conviction. Your lifeless body will be entombed in your graveyard of disbelief. A path to an empty conscience is the only one that leads to naught. In the spiritual dimension after demise, we are the paradise lost that has disappeared.
”
”
D.L. Lewis
“
Then it’s a deal, we’re friends.”
[…]
“Can we just make one conditional rule here? That if we get into a situation where we know—absolutely—that we’re going to die, we can have—“
She pulled her hand away. “Don’t say it!”
He did. “Sex.”
She glared her disbelief. “You are such and asshole!”
“I am,” Ian agreed. I’m afraid that accepting me for who I am comes with the territory when talking friendship.”
“Stay in the shadows, asshole,” she said, then turned to stalk up the lawn toward the deck.
“Thank you,” he said as he headed for the shrubs. “I appreciate our open-minded acceptance of my asshole-ishness.”
And he wasn’t sure, but he could’ve sword that he heard Phoebe laugh.
”
”
Suzanne Brockmann (Do or Die (Reluctant Heroes, #1)(Troubleshooters,#18))
“
Mandelbrot moved beyond dimensions 0,1,2,3…to a seeming impossibility: fractional dimensions. The notion is a conceptual high-wire act. For nonmathematicians it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet it proves extraordinarily powerful.
”
”
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
“
I believe all I'm told, I've disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
”
”
Samuel Beckett (Malloy)
“
I believe all I'm told, I've disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
”
”
Samuel Beckett (Molloy)
“
Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief- is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it's better to hang oneself at once.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
“
The film strives for charm but falls flat in its attempt,” he read aloud. “Although fiction generally requires some suspension of disbelief, the utter ridiculousness of the balcony scene gives me so much secondhand embarrassment I want to bleach my memory so I never have to think about it again. I have more chemistry with my bedroom lamp than the lead actors have with each other, and the dialogue sounds like that of a parody rather than an actual romantic comedy. If AI wrote and performed a movie, it would look like this.” He was quiet for a second before looking at me. “What the hell have you been doing with your bedroom lamp?”
“Turning it on,” I said in response to his question. “Oh God. That was terrible.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Sloth (Kings of Sin, #4))
“
Preparation for the interview therefore ceases to be about the actual content of the job and instead becomes a theatrical rehearsal, concerned primarily with costume, demeanour, eye contact, stage presence, learning one's lines.
The character of the applicant must be placed within a seamless yet engaging narrative, and any outside interests incorporated into the work sphere (so for instance, for a retail job, an interest in films becomes "I like to keep track of all the latest DVD releases").
Above all, it is important to appear 'natural'. Actual experience is secondary to a willingness to blend in; to contribute to that collective suspension of disbelief which is vital to the smooth running of the contemporary workplace.
”
”
Ivor Southwood (Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work)
“
To refuse to go along with this performance and its mutual suspension of disbelief risks bringing the full weight of the institution down on the "customer"; he is reminded of his legal obligations and low status.
”
”
Ivor Southwood (Non-Stop Inertia: Life in and out of Precarious Work)
“
Perhaps all love affairs are nothing more than the projections of hopeful hearts looking for soft lodging in a world that would have them be hard. Perhaps.
Perhaps love is always just this; the suspension of disbelief and the fierce welcoming of a shared and altered reality.
Is not the impossible always made possible by love? The ridiculous transformed to serious? What was once only a stuff of dreams made real? If we are willing to allow it or admit it, are we not all altered by our loving?
”
”
Jeanette LeBlanc
“
Suspension of Disbelief.
”
”
Charles Christian (Writing Genre Fiction: Creating Imaginary Worlds: The 12 Rules)
“
There are stories like Superman, which require suspension of disbelief for maximum enjoyment. Then there are stories like mine – real stories – where for the most part, disbelief need not be suspended. There are no flying humans, no unfamiliar planets, and no optical illusions.
”
”
Ilan Mochari (Zinsky the Obscure)
“
You know, the suspension of disbelief is fragile. It’s hard to achieve it and hard to maintain. One bit of unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything outside the imaginary world you’ve created is enough to destroy that world.
”
”
Ernest Adams (Fundamentals of Game Design)
“
Kalinske then described what made the videogame industry unique, what made it superbly unpredictable, and what tomorrow might or might not bring. But along this wild roller-coaster ride, there was one thing that would not change. “Suspension of disbelief. It’s always been the fundamental component of diversion, whether that diversion is books, movies, or the theater. Advances in gaming mean we will come to supply that component more effectively than any other medium. The interactive entertainment business is going to allow the Walter Mitty in all of us to finally realize our dreams. We are going to become great football players, race car drivers, or aviators. We are going to move into and occupy new worlds that were formerly only available to us in dreams.
”
”
Blake J. Harris (Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation)
“
Belief in Fate, like belief in God, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, the ability to accept without physical proof that there is something larger than yourself operating behind the scenes in the universe, there is a Plan that’s being followed and your own small life is a part of it.
”
”
J.T. Geissinger (Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler, #3))
“
There are two times we need to use suspension of disbelief when we go to the movies and when we enter a church .
”
”
Gerald Lanteigne
“
The tall tales for which Diego was famous, improvised effortlessly as a spider spins his web, their pattern changing with each retelling, were fables wrapped in fables, woven so skillfully out of truth and fantasy that one thread could not be distinguished from the other, told with such artistry that they compelled the momentary suspension of disbelief.
”
”
Bertram D. Wolfe (The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera)
“
Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.
”
”
Jalina Mhyana (Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes)
“
But really, my lord, ’tis a nerve-wracking situation and I would . . . well . . . If we could get it over?” Connall stared at her blankly, clearly taken completely by surprise at this outburst, then he frowned and echoed, “Get it over?” “Aye . . . well . . .” She forced a smile and began wringing her hands together as she explained, “Tis rather like knowing that someday soon, though you are not sure when exactly, you will have to approach the blacksmith about knocking a rotten tooth out.” “Knockin’ a rotten tooth . . .” Connall was staring at her with disbelief, though she didn’t understand why. Nor did she understand why, when he finally spoke, he sounded somewhat upset. “Me lady wife, I realize ye havenae—What on earth makes ye think—‘Knockin ’ out a rotten tooth’?” Eva bit her lip, unsure what she should say to improve the situation. He seemed rather offended by the comparison. “Well, I have never—I mean, from what I have been told, it does not sound like something to look forward to, my lord.” “What ha’e ye been told?” He sounded as if he were forcing patience. Eva considered whether she had the courage to repeat Mavis’s description and was quite sure she didn’t. It was one thing to be told that by another woman, it was quite another to repeat it to the man with the boiled sausage he intended to use on you. She shook her head helplessly, but Connall apparently wasn’t in the mood to humor her. “What’d that useless brother o’ yers tell ye?” “Oh, it was not Jonathan,” she assured him quickly. “It was my maid, Mavis . . . Well, she was not truly my maid. She worked in the kitchens, but did occasionally act as lady’s maid to me . . . Well, once or twice. She traveled to court with us because Jonathan said I needed a lady’s maid there,” Eva explained lamely, then fell silent, aware she’d been babbling. “I see, and what did this Mavis tell ye aboot what goes on between a husband and wife?” Connall was sounding a little less angry now, she noted with relief. Still, it was difficult to imagine telling him so she said instead, “Well she was describing what went on between the servants, not necessarily between husband and wife, if you see what I mean?” “Stop stalling,” he said quietly. “A wife shouldnae fear telling her husband ought.” Eva sighed at these words, it was becoming obvious that he wasn’t going to let this pass and she was going to have to repeat what Mavis had said. She was beginning to wish that she had never opened her mouth, but had simply awaited his pleasure in silent suspense. Unfortunately, she hadn’t done so. Deciding that there was nothing for it, she gathered her courage and blurted, “She said it appeared that the man and woman wrestled a bit and then he stuck his boiled sausage up between her legs.” Connall made an odd sound, somewhere between a cough and snort, then turned his head abruptly away so that she could not see his expression. Eva was not certain at first if he were angry or shocked, but then she noted the way his shoulders were shaking and suspected the man was actually laughing at her. Indignation quickly rose up in her, but before she could say anything, there was a knock at the door. Eva glared at her husband as he glanced around, then stood and headed for the door. “Yer flouncin’!” Connall crowed with amusement. “Damn me, I’d ha’e sworn ye were no a flouncer, but yer flouncin’!” Realizing
”
”
Hannah Howell (The Eternal Highlander (McNachton Vampires, #1))
“
It wasn't Vedette's easy slide into prejudice that unsettled Maria so much as the suspension of disbelief it suggested, as if reality took the crooked shape of the mind into which it was poured. What gave conspiracy the credibility reasonable explanation lacked? What hunger for order, even diabolical order, did it satisfy?
”
”
Anthony Marra (Mercury Pictures Presents)
“
We feel afraid of the impossible in horror because we hold some flicker of belief in it. In a strangely backwards idiom, we say that this requires our “suspension of disbelief,” where doubt is a body that hovers or is hung and faith falls down to earth. It is fear’s twin.
”
”
Claire Cronin (Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God)
“
Man, Sub-creator’ was in one sense a new way of expressing what is often called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief, and Tolkien made it the central argument of the lecture.
‘What really happens,’ he wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.
”
”
Humphrey Carpenter (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography)
“
Vittoria was watching him. “Do you believe in God, Mr. Langdon?” The question startled him. The earnestness in Vittoria’s voice was even more disarming than the inquiry. Do I believe in God? He had hoped for a lighter topic of conversation to pass the trip. A spiritual conundrum, Langdon thought. That’s what my friends call me. Although he studied religion for years, Langdon was not a religious man. He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches, the strength religion gave so many people . . . and yet, for him, the intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if one were truly going to “believe” had always proved too big an obstacle for his academic mind. “I want to believe,” he heard himself say. Vittoria’s reply carried no judgment or challenge. “So why don’t you?” He chuckled. “Well, it’s not that easy. Having faith requires leaps of faith, cerebral acceptance of miracles—immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist scripture . . . they all carry similar requirements—and similar penalties. They claim that if I don’t live by a specific code I will go to hell. I can’t imagine a God who would rule that way.” “I hope you don’t let your students dodge questions that shamelessly.” The comment caught him off guard. “What?” “Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories . . . legends and history of man’s quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God’s hand?” Langdon took a long moment to consider it. “I’m prying,” Vittoria apologized. “No, I just . . .” “Certainly you must debate issues of faith with your classes.” “Endlessly.” “And you play devil’s advocate, I imagine. Always fueling the debate.” Langdon smiled. “You must be a teacher too.” “No, but I learned from a master. My father could argue two sides of a Möbius Strip.” Langdon laughed, picturing the artful crafting of a Möbius Strip—a twisted ring of paper, which technically possessed only one side. Langdon had first seen the single-sided shape in the artwork of M. C. Escher.
”
”
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
“
I do confess I was drawn to him, and felt there was potential for a lasting friendship. I certainly didn't want to count that out at that time, so I kept my cynicism to myself. I know now that in so doing, I took the first step toward suspension of my own disbelief, completely oblivious to the slippery slope ahead.
”
”
David Knaack (Enoch's Thread)
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No such suspension of disbelief was needed on the morning of 13 September 1645. If I had been looking south from my house, I would have seen an awesome sight. During the civil war fought all over Britain and Ireland, the Scottish army led by General David Leslie surprised the Royalists and the Marquis of Montrose at Philiphaugh, west of Selkirk. In the early morning mist, he sent about 2,000 cavalry troopers through our little valley, perhaps keeping to the metalled surface of the old road leading to Oakwood Fort. They moved quietly around Howden Hill and, while Leslie led the rest of his army in a frontal assault, the cavalry attacked the rear of the Royalists and scattered them. Philiphaugh was a savage, sadistic rout with much unnecessary slaughter excused by fundamentalist piety. The greater part of the landscape of the valley was much altered after 1645. The fields, the thorn hedges, the shelterbelts of hardwoods, the steadings, the big houses and their policies are not old. After the middle of the 18th century, the pace of agricultural improvement quickened and shaped much of the countryside we see now and believe to be traditional. One of the most important catalysts was drainage and below where I sit in the evening stretches the 35-acre Tile Field. It is billiard-table flat because it was scraped for clay and at the western end stood a tile works. Its kilns were fired by the trees of the Hartwood and the clay puddled in a pond formed by the Common Burn and the Hartwoodburn.
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Alistair Moffat (Scotland: A History from Earliest Times)
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We long for the suspension of self-consciousness, of the pseudo-analytic attitude that has become second nature; but neither art nor religion, historically the great emancipators from the prison of the self, retain the power to discourage disbelief. In a society based so largely on illusions and appearances, the ultimate illusions, art and religion, have no future.
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Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations)
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I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
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Rachel Cusk (Transit)
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...some proponents of the radical Darwinian version of natural selection insist on randomness rather than design as an explanation for how new mutations are generated prior to the restrictive action of natural selection itself. But this is untenable, for in any traditional scientific context, "randomness" is synonymous with "indeterminacy" or "acausality", and when all is said and done, acausality means what it always has: magic. That is, something which exists without external or intrinsic cause has been selected for and brought into existence by nothing at all of a causal nature, and is thus the sort of something-from-nothing proposition favored, usually through voluntary suspension of disbelief, by frequenters of magic shows.
Inexplicably, some of those taking this position nevertheless accuse of magical thinking anyone proposing to introduce an element of teleological volition
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Christopher Langan
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...some proponents of the radical Darwinian version of natural selection insist on randomness rather than design as an explanation for how new mutations are generated prior to the restrictive action of natural selection itself. But this is untenable, for in any traditional scientific context, "randomness" is synonymous with "indeterminacy" or "acausality", and when all is said and done, acausality means what it always has: magic. That is, something which exists without external or intrinsic cause has been selected for and brought into existence by nothing at all of a causal nature, and is thus the sort of something-from-nothing proposition favored, usually through voluntary suspension of disbelief, by frequenters of magic shows.
Inexplicably, some of those taking this position nevertheless accuse of magical thinking anyone proposing to introduce an element of teleological volition.
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Christopher Langan
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But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief- is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it's better to hang oneself at once.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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We do not have to believe in magic spells for this to work. We only have to be able to enjoy a film. The same elements are at work: cinematic technology, suspension of disbelief, the director’s skill in organizing a compelling narrative. The result is the same. Life, too, is like this. What appears to us through the senses seems real and solid enough, but once we submit it to deeper scrutiny (whether through physics, postmodern philosophy, or Buddhist meditation), that out-thereness-in-its-own-right of the thing starts to dissolve. Once we notice its utter contingency, the gut feeling that there must be something solid and unchanging at its core weakens. The thing is seen not only to emerge from a complex set of causes and conditions but also to depend on a vast number of parts, attributes, and components. If we look closer still, we find that it is what it is because of the way we talk and think about it, because of the peculiar way in which our culture perceptually organizes it so that it makes sense. Nothing else, no extra metaphysical essence, is necessary. While language forces us to use the word “it,” ultimately there is nothing to which it refers. Life
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Stephen Batchelor (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World)
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Just as a viable fantasy relies on suspension of disbelief, so a viable reality relies on suspension of belief.
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Ken Goudsward
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I’ve started writing a treatise on the role of “willing suspension of disbelief” in fiction and drama. Its working title is The Technobabble Sufficiency.
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J. Neil Schulman (The Fractal Man)
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Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.
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Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
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Love cannot exist with understanding but understanding can bring about an attenuation of most things one recognizes as human. A tale of how to possibly navigate this conundrum in concert with being mgtow.
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David Chalmers
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The entire field of anthropological value theory since the 1980s has been founded on a single intuition: the fact that we use the same word to describe the benefits and virtues of a commodity for sale on the market (the “value” of a haircut or a curtain rod) and our ideas about what is ultimately important in life (“values” such as truth, beauty, justice), is not a coincidence. There is some hidden level where both come down to the same thing. [...] It’s the role of money as universal equivalent that allows for the division. That which is thus rendered comparable can be considered under the rubric of “value” and this value, like that of money, lies in its equivalence. The value of “values” in contrast lies precisely in their lack of equivalence; they are seen as unique, crystallized forms. They cannot or should not be converted into money. Nor can they be precisely compared with one another. No one will ever be able produce a mathematical formula for how much it is fitting to betray one’s political principles in the name of religion, or to neglect one’s family in the pursuit of art. True, people do make such decisions all the time. But they will always resist formalization—to even suggest doing so is at best odd, and probably offensive. [...] If one cares about the character and whether they achieve their goals, the reality of the rest of the machinery—the nature of the cosmos, the characters, the rules of the game—becomes inconsequential. If one is enjoying the bedtime story, one doesn’t care that penguins can’t really talk. This is innocuous enough. But it becomes much less innocuous when this sort of narrative form is applied to political situations (and, it was part of my argument that the more politically dominant a class of people tends to be, the more their defining modes of activity will tend to be given some kind of easily narrativizable form). Suddenly, we move from willing suspension of disbelief, to something very much like an ideological naturalization effect.
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David Graeber
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They felt obliged to go on living as if Britain had not died, with troupes of hypnotists encouraging viewers in their suspension of disbelief. Institutions must reproduce themselves - including, perhaps most crucially those of nation and state…They abandoned it some time ago, and what we are left with is not so much Britain as ‘Britain’ - the inverted comma ex-Realm of of Her Majesty… Britain has remoreselessly crumbled into vaudeville ‘Britain’, a realm of general impersonation and self-delusion.
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Tom Nairn (Pariah: Misfortunes of The British Kingdom)
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It is impossible to understand Crowley. unless we grasp that, like Madame Blavatsky and Mathers and Yeats and Florence Farr, he took magic as seriously as Lord Rutherford took atomic physics. Literarym commentators often make the same mistake about Yeats: that he regarded magic as a romantic exercise in suspension of disbelief. Yeat's [sic] magical notebooks reveal this to have been untrue; they go into overwhelming detail about magical procedures and symbols and show that he continued to be obsessed by it long after he ceased to be a member of the Golden Dawn.
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Colin Wilson (Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast)
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~[TOTAL SPORTEK]^^ Soccer Streams West Ham United vs Brighton Totalsportek Soccer Streams
How to watch today's Brighton vs West Ham Premier League game: Live stream, TV channel, and start time. West Ham United hit the road on Sunday for a trip they dread more than any other in the Premier League calendar, making their way to the Amex Stadium for a clash with Brighton & Hove Albion.
The Seagulls come into this one still stinging from midweek heartbreak. Brighton's four-game unbeaten streak was snapped in dramatic fashion by Aston Villa, who stormed back from a 2-0 deficit to stun Fabian Hurzeler's side. A late rocket from Jan Paul van Hecke, his second of the evening, offered a glimmer of hope, but in the end it was too little, too late. Villa departed the south coast with a wild 4-3 victory, leaving the home support in utter disbelief at how a commanding lead slipped through their fingers.
West Ham didn't suffer defeat, but their outing at Old Trafford hardly sparked celebration either. Diogo Dalot put Manchester United on top before Soungoutou Magassa grabbed his first Premier League goal late on to snatch a 1-1 draw for Nuno Espirito Santo's side.
A point away at Old Trafford is no small feat, but it also prolongs the Hammers' winless streak in league play to three straight matches. As a result, they remain stuck in the relegation zone, two points shy of climbing out and overtaking Leeds United in 17th.
Brighton vs West Ham kick-off time
Premier League - Premier League
7 Dec 2025 - 20:00
The American Express Community Stadium
The match will be played at the Amex Stadium in Brighton, England on Sunday, December 7, with kick-off at 10:00 am ET/ 7:00 am PT for fans in the US.
Brighton team news
Brighton supporters are keeping their fingers crossed for young forward Stefanos Tzimas, who went down with a knee issue during the first half of the loss to Aston Villa. The early signs aren't encouraging, with Fabian Hurzeler bracing himself for the possibility that the 19-year-old could be facing an extended stint on the treatment table.
With Tzimas sidelined, the door swings open for veteran striker Danny Welbeck to reclaim his starting spot. Few opponents suit him better, he's bagged six Premier League goals against West Ham, more than he's scored versus any other side in the division.
Brighton may welcome Yasin Ayari back into the fold this weekend after his muscle problem, but the list of question marks remains a long one. Kaoru Mitoma (ankle), Georginio Rutter (head) and Tommy Watson (undisclosed) are all touch-and-go. Meanwhile, James Milner (muscle), Solly March (knee) and Adam Webster (knee) are completely ruled out.
West Ham team news
As for West Ham, there's a major boost in the creativity department, Lucas Paqueta is available again after sitting out a suspension for his bizarre sending-off against Liverpool. His return likely nudges Tomas Soucek back to a bench role.
It’s not all positive news for the visitors, though. Brazilian defender Igor Julio is prevented from lining up against his parent club, and winger Crysencio Summerville is still at risk of missing out due to a knock.
The absentees don't stop there: Lukasz Fabianski (back) and Oliver Scarles (shoulder) are confirmed unavailable. But one man who loves this fixture is West Ham's No. 9 Callum Wilson, who has tormented Brighton in previous meetings with eight combined goals and assists five finishes of his own and three set-ups.
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Anothonyjoshua