Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

To be honest I don't really know because I really didn't care when I was writing about mixing up reality with what was not reality.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

You see, if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.

Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.

Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What's a doctor going to say? You're not ill, you're mad as a muffin? They'll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.