Alex Garland Quotes

When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?

People say I have a distorted lens. I think I see things as they really are.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my every-day existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.

I'm not here now. This isn't happening. You're just visiting a dream of mine.

It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,--the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

I couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what I wanted to be real.

Reality is a question of perspective.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

In the dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.

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.