Reality - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Thus was the edifice of my brief dream of happiness dashed, broken, to the ground of reality.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)

The cruelest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

In that beginning was the same fantastic contrast that ran through the whole adventure: the mingling of everyday reality with the stark Inexplicable.

- JackWilliamson, The Legion of Time (1938)

I wrestled with reality for forty years, and I am happy to state that I finally won out over it.

- Mary Chase, Harvey (play, 1944)

Amnesia is the best method of escaping from reality.

- A. E. van Vogt, The Players of Null-A (1948)

''Does Big Brother exist?'' ''Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.'' ''Does he exist in the same way as I exist?'' ''You do not exist.''

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

There is no reality. There is no life, no freedom, no will. God damn. Don't you realize? We are . . . We are all characters in a book. As the book is read, we dance our dances; when the book is read again, we dance again.

- Alfred Bester, ''The Starcomber'' (1954)

It seemed as if the structure of reality trembled for an instant, and that behind the world of the senses he caught a glimpse of another and totally different universe . . .

- Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (1956)

He was slowly beginning to doubt the existence of the phenomenal universe itself, and he could not bring himself to care enough about the probably unreal to feel that it mattered what intellectual organization you imposed on it.

- James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958)

''The other night coming home on the bus I got a look at how things really are. I saw through the illusion. The other people in the bus were nothing but scarecrows propped up in their seats. The bus itself - '' He made a sweeping motion with his hands. ''A hollow shell, nothing but a few upright supports, plus my seat and the driver's seat.''

- Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint (1959)

Reality? It is only the illusion we can agree upon.

- James Gunn, The Joy Makers (1961)

Reality's always a little dull to whoever's involved in it.

- Keith Laumer, The Other Side of Time (1965)

The mind selects, out of a mass of sense data, those ones of all the possible items to pay attention to, to react to, to treat as ''real.'' But who knows what the mind may be rejecting, what lies unseen out there in the world? Perhaps these illusions are not illusions at all, but real things that ordinarily are filtered out of the streams of incoming sense data by our intellectual demand for a logical and consistent world.

- Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, The Ganymede Takeover (1967)

The whole of modern so-called existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

- Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, LouisWu flicked into reality.

- Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970)

A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make.

- Philip K. Dick, ''The Android and the Human'' (1972)

Reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that: a playing of illusions on the shallow void.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

The theory changes the reality it describes.

- Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said (1974)

History and reality have a way of not coinciding.

- Alan Dean Foster, ''Dream Done Green'' (1974)

What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain - you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

For us the enemy was Reality.

- Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

Little stars had supplanted the silvery mist, nowhere near as imposing as the big blue one in the starscreen but equally as beautiful. Maybe they were reflections, and maybe they weren't. And maybe the inns Don Quixote stayed in really were castles. And maybe Mars, if you looked at it the right way, really was crisscrossed with blue canals.

- Robert F. Young, ''Spacetrack'' (1974)

The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

There was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

One desires reality. To a home-dweller, reality comes in the comforting familiarity of a neighborhood, the greeting of a friend. A traveler must seek it out, and tell tales to encourage belief in himself, what he has done and seen.

- Carter Scholz, ''Travels'' (1980)

The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides.

- Poul Anderson, ''The Saturn Game'' (1981)

Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick, Valis (1981)

She had decided that reality was whatever happened, whatever she perceived.

- Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)

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.

- Charles De Lint, ''Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night'' (1995)

Always remember you are a starchild. You will become any reality that you get with unless you influence that reality to become you.

- Kalamu ya Salaam, ''Buddy Bolden'' (1996)

Welcome to the desert of the real.

- AndyWachowski and LarryWachowski, The Matrix (film, 1999)