Reality

Texts



Reality is More Powerful than Literature (1)

I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and t...
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

What is Meant by Reality? (2)

What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable � now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It l...
A Room of One's Own

Our Refusal to Face Reality (3)

It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how ...
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Time is not Real (4)

But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful....
Siddhartha

Hungry for Reality (5)

What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance poli...
The Glass Bead Game

Alternate Reality (6)

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality - call it an alternate reality - to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as su...
South of the Border, West of the Sun

Past Distortion (7)

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (i...
Ignorance

A Full-fledged Soul (8)

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that ...
The Book of Disquiet

Illusory Reality (9)

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such t...


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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays