Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

I don't want to live in a fantasy world.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

Many people would rather have fine words and false hopes than the truth which is unacceptable.

How hard it is to accept the truth. How hard it is

I had had enough pretend. I wanted to be in the real world.

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.

Life ain't the movies.

I'm totally not kidding. Life is too short. This is all too hard to do to actually be kidding about the whole thing.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

Reality is for people who can't face drugs.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.

More like the real thing,' said the lord Digory softly. - The Last Battle

Sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

Seeming and being are not one and the same.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

We create the illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. And when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.

The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.