All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held Reality down fluttering to a bench.

-Sackville-West,Vita (Victoria Mary)
  The Land,'Summer'.

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  Larry Doyle toTom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act1.

We were now actually in the inner sanctuary of the Nanda Devi Basin, and at each step I experienced that subtlethrill which anyone of imagination must feel when treading hitherto unexplored country† My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment ?

-Shipton, Eric Earle
  Nanda Devi.

In reality, killing time Is only the name for another of the multifarious ways By whichTime kills us.

-Sitwell, Sir (Francis) Osbert
  'Milordo Inglese'.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

-Sontag, Susan
  In the NewYork Review of Books,18 Apr. Later published in book form as On Photography (1976).

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

-Thomas, Dylan Marlais
  Quite Early One Morning,'On Poetry'.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

-Updike,John Hoyer
  Self-Consciousness, I.'A Soft Spring Night in Shillington'.

So writing ismy sole remaining vice.It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable.

-Updike,John Hoyer
  Self-Consciousness,VI.'On Being A Self Forever'.