We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
Rainer Maria RilkeWas it good to treasure the memory of a few perfect hours together? Or would I have been better off never meeting him?
Jennifer EcholsYou wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?
Jean ThompsonTags: life success reality learning humanity identity time soul youth change heart self memory destiny
At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.
Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
Tags: inspirational truth reality equality women nationalism capitalism economics government government-corruption exploitation human-rights corporations india arundhati-roy environmental-degradation dam false-gods narmada-valley
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
Arundhati RoyTags: life reality carpe-diem death living dream dead dying life-and-death truths alive existing
What is life without incompatible realities?
Ursula K. Le GuinTags: life paradox reality contradiction compatibility
There is no brutality and cruelty in battles and wars; in reality only the outcome matters.
M.F. MoonzajerTags: reality cruelty battles brutality wars
I've been in darkness nearly all my life, and you brought light into my existance for the first time. And maybe that's why I started to... have feeling for you. You seemed like a dream. [...] But that's just infatuation. Hero worship. It's not real. I've learned a lot about love in these last months. Abd part of what I've learned is you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head. Neither of us could have lived that way.
Zoë MarriottAt cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman's wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools in working my way through our social obligations. I believed that playing the roles of wife and mother were the least I could do to help support Tom's career.
During the day, I was a puzzle with innumerable pieces. One piece made my family a nourishing breakfast. Another piece ferried the kids to school and to soccer practice. A third piece managed to trip to the grocery store. There was also a piece that wanted to sleep for eighteen hours a day and the piece that woke up shaking from yet another nightmare. And there was the piece that attended business functions and actually fooled people into thinking I might have something constructive to offer.
I was a circus performer traversing the tightwire, and I could fall off into a vortex devoid of reality at any moment. There was, and had been for a very long time, an intense sense of despair. A self-deprecating voice inside told me I had no chance of getting better. I lived in an emotional black hole.
p20-21, talking about dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder).
Tags: reality social despair emotion denial depression acting perfection social-anxiety puzzle hopeless hopelessness mental-health rationalization mental-illness circus pieces pretending dissociative-identity-disorder multiple-personality-disorder black-hole parts mpd did functioning
Of course the theologians fought the facts found by the geologists, the scientists, and sought to sustain the sacred Scriptures. They mistook the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them proudly proved that "there were giants in those days." They accounted for the fossils by saying that God had made them to try our faith, or that the Devil had imitated the works of the Creator.
They answered the geologists by saying that the "days" in Genesis were long periods of time, and that after all the flood might have been local. They told the astronomers that the sun and moon were not actually, but only apparently, stopped. And that the appearance was produced by the reflection and refraction of light.
They excused the slavery and polygamy, the robbery and murder upheld in the Old Testament by saying that the people were so degraded that Jehovah was compelled to pander to their ignorance and prejudice.
In every way the clergy sought to evade the facts, to dodge the truth, to preserve the creed.
At first they flatly denied the facts -- then they belittled them -- then they harmonized them -- then they denied that they had denied them. Then they changed the meaning of the "inspired" book to fit the facts. At first they said that if the facts, as claimed, were true, the Bible was false and Christianity itself a superstition. Afterward they said the facts, as claimed, were true and that they established beyond all doubt the inspiration of the Bible and the divine origin of orthodox religion.
Anything they could not dodge, they swallowed and anything they could not swallow, they dodged.
I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities, its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles, its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believe in the existence of devils -- talked and made bargains with them. expelled them from people and animals.
This, of itself, is enough. We know, if we know anything, that devils do not exist -- that Christ never cast them out, and that if he pretended to, he was either ignorant, dishonest or insane.
Tags: science reality lies fabrications theologians devils
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