Avoidance of Reality Quotes

The young have a genius for discovering imagined grievances. It goes without saying that imagined grievances cannot be cured but they enable the young to evade those aspects of reality which do not minister to their self-importance... .

Maybe it's because I was too much reality, but I'm not interested in seeing too much reality anymore. I'd rather watch a Dean Martin concert and let the world go by.

People don't really want to know what happens. They ask you for just a second, but then they don't want to know.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

And to stick our head in the sand and pretend that we are somehow safer if we do not know or to pretend we are somehow safer if we limit our options seems to me not only foolish but actually dangerous.

It just seems to me that the world's kind of a mess, and the more messy it gets, the more interested I am in escapist fare. Having a good time is something that isn't about the war in Iraq or the Asian flu or the Kyoto protocol - things that are horribly depressing to consider in our real lives. I'm eager to get away from them.

You know the problem, we don't want to believe what we know.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

When you strive for perfection, you compare different versions of what could be instead of being present with what is. Perfectionism is an attempt to inhabit an imaginary world in order to avoid experiencing the world in which you live.

Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.

I'm always trying to do the impossible to please people. It comes from not being secure in myself and not looking at the things within I have to fix. Sometimes you keep going because you don't want to face the truth.

Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones?'

In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

People deny things that are true all the time.

There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought, and he therefore cannot carry his own reflection to any logical conclusion.

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.

It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.

Politicians have made up their own version of Islam to avoid having to deal with the reality of Islam because it's just too daunting, frightening, scary, whatever, and they don't want to deal with it.

Many of us stay in situations that don't serve us because we don't want to confront the fact that we've failed.