reality

The real trouble with reality is that there is no background music.

Is my imagination as important as reality? Sometimes I think YES... It's imagination what makes reality tolerable... Sometimes, I just want to close my eyes and fall in to the endless imagination...

Since we have free will, we create our own reality and virtually everything is negotiable.

One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined. (page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton)

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.

If I can alter my perception of the reality, I can change the reality itself.

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.

...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.

When flying dreams hit the soil of reality, all that remains are the imprints of experience.

He continued with a laugh, "And for highly motivated people, there are few more frustrating situations than realizing that the goals you've set will require a shift in the basic laws of time and space.

The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds

For eventually one gets over reality__ affront to one__ innocence. One grows accustomed to the melancholy fact that we all sell ourselves at one time or another, that whoring is the dirty little secret of our success as human beings.

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I__ grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster__pread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

When we come face-to-face with our fears we are really confronting ourselves.

For all our mutual experienceOur separate conclusions are the sameNow we are forced to recognize our inhumanityOur reason coexists with our insanityBut we choose between reality and madnessIt's either sadness or euphoria

The book argues that even though many cases have been held up as classic examples of modern American __itch hunts,_ none of them fits that description. McMartin certainly comes close. But a careful examination of the evidence presented at trial demonstrates why, in my view, a reasonable juror could vote for conviction, as many did in this case. Other cases that have been painted as witch-hunts turn out to involve significant, even overwhelming, evidence of guilt. There are a few cases to the contrary, but even those are more complicated than the witch-hunt narrative allows. In short, there was not, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of __itch hunts_ in the 1980s. There were big mistakes made in how some cases were handled, particularly in the earliest years. But even in those years there were cases such as those of Frank Fuster and Kelly Michaels that, I believe, were based on substantial evidence but later unfairly maligned as having no evidentiary support.

But fairytales were, at best, dirty mirrors whose warped and pitted surfaces reflected a highly distorted view of the truth, quite different from reality.