Larry Wall Quotes

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

We think that computer models represent reality especially if we developed the models.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Young people are having a hard time with what's reality and what's fantasy these days...We created discussion. It wasn't to create controversy for sale's sake, but rather it was my obligation to use the medium for discussion. Nobody's discussing the grown-up topics; they are faking and fronting.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

I know you [Donald Trump] live in your own reality, but that is not the facts.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth.

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.

When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals.

In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

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.

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.

We are drowning in images. Photography is used as a propaganda tool, which serves to sell products and ideas. I use the same approach to show aspects of reality.

Reality's its own thing. And I'm not really into reality that much. I'm into this cinematic stylized reality that can comment on reality. It's like the most beautiful parts of reality and the saddest parts, but it's none of this middle ground.

I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.