I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It’s much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.
All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control. To be real.
This is personal, she’d said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn’t see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.
There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.
I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. As long as I didn’t say it aloud, it wasn’t real.
Again, it occurred to me how weird it was to be permanent in a place that to everyone else was only temporary. Like I could never be sure if they were the ones who weren’t real, or if I was.
The thing is, you can’t always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.
So maybe it wasn’t the fairy tale. But those stories weren’t real anyway. Mine were.
But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.
There were endless ways to spend your days, I knew that, none of them right or wrong. But given the chance for a real do-over, another way around, who would say no?
I mean, it’s impossible to fake anything if you’ve already seen the other person in a way they’d never choose for you to. You can’t go back from that.
I feel a real sense of duty to use the voice and the platform I’ve been afforded by my fame to speak out for those whose voices don’t get a chance to be heard.
I think that we see war as a virtual thing and we even get to believe that bombs fall on top of cardboard cutouts and stuff like that. They don’t. They kill real people, real children, real mothers and millions of innocent people.
It isn’t necessary to be perfect to be a channel for the universe. You just have to be real- be yourself. The more real, honest, and spontaneous you are, the more freely the creative force can flow through you.
Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
The unconscious – that is to say, the ‘repressed’ – offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
Real faith has perfect peace and joy and a shout at any time. It always sees the victory.
For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.