Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

Reality: What a concept!

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

Reality really isn't as dull as it's cracked up to be.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.

I think reality is over-rated

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

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

Reality itself is too twisted.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.