Gene Wolfe Quotes

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.

How was I supposed to know what's real and what's not? It feels like I'm the only one who doesn't know the difference.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.

The artificial world that we create through images will essentially become real.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became.

If the experience of reality matters, than nothing is going to be better than dreaming. Because dreams feel real to everybody while they are happening. Some people have vivid imagination, some not so vivid, but everybody has vivid dreams.

Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.

Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly.

Americans like to believe we can overcome all obstacles and always triumph in the end, but that's not real life and a steady diet of stories like that will give you a pretty unhealthy view of reality.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

Knowledge, in so far as it is directed to practical matters, has only to enumerate the principal possible attitudes of the thing towards us, as well as our best possible attitude towards it. Therein lies the ordinary function of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the path of becoming. But to seek to penetrate with them into the inmost nature of things, is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it.