“But when reality was hopeless, fantasy became more and more necessary.”

“At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more sure that the fantasy was reality.”

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ”

“Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.”

“Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.”

“Somewhere during the process of intellectual development there was a disconnect in the believer’s ability to discern fantasy from reality and the outlandish, scientifically impossible, physically unrealistic, historically erroneous, intellectually retarded drabble that is contained within the pages of the bible became not only viable, but a more accurate representation of the truth than, well, the actual truth.”