Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

The world ultimately is what we say it is.

When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion.

A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

Those who are awake all live in the same world. Those who are asleep live in their own worlds.

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.

Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption thatthe other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only onereality.

When you're dreaming, you don't know it's a dream. You might even interpret a dream in your dream - and then wake up and realize it was all a dream. Perhaps a great awakening will reveal this to be a dream as well.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.

Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

Hence reason also demands that, since our thoughts cannot all be true because we are not wholly perfect, what truth they do possess must inevitably be found in the thoughts we have when awake, rather than in our dreams.

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.

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.

Buddha was speaking about reality. Reality may be one, in its deepest essence, but Buddha also stated that all propositions about reality are only contingent.

An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.

We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

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

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.