Karen Russell Quotes

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Is a dream reality till you wake up?

If life wasn't real it would be the craziest psychedelic trip ever

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out they're living in another century entirely. I often have the feeling — and it does show up in my books — that this is all just a stage.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my every-day existence--but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

I'm not here now. This isn't happening. You're just visiting a dream of mine.

There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

One can't even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex!

If nothing is the way it seems, then this life is just a haunted dream.

What is wonderful about my art is that dream and reality can become one. There is just one step between the two.

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

From such a young age, I was raised and have raised myself on film to such an extent, that it has sometimes bled into my reality. There are times I've felt very Mulholland Drive, where people's dream worlds overlap with each other.