C. J. Cherryh Quotes

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

I'm really nervous, because it's actually happening. You forget after a while when you start talking about something that it's actually going to happen.

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

And what exactly is a dream and what exactly is a joke?

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

Apart from thoughts, there is no independent entity called the world. In deep sleep there are no thoughts, and there is no world. In the states of waking and dream, there are thoughts, and there is a world also. Just as the spider emits the thread (of the web) out of itself and again withdraws it into itself, likewise the mind projects the world out of itself and again resolves it into itself.

'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.

A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Nobody in this world possesses absolute truth.

But why should you be interested in me?" Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.

When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

Because if you remember - and people forget this - the first two years of Game of Thrones everybody was going, "I don't know what's going on, but I really like it." And you really didn't know what to make of a lot of people, and now it's changed and people aren't really talking about that. Now it's like you're watching West Wing or Friends, you know the characters and you're like, "What in the world is going to happen?"

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?