“How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.”

“How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?”

“My mind was getting away from reality again, and I reluctantly drew it back in. There is no getting away from reality.”

“There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.”

“Objective Reality and Truth requires neither ones consent nor dissent.”

“Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)”