Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Interpretation
Reality is shaped by how we perceive time; the past appears more definite than the present.
This quote by Salman Rushdie highlights the subjective nature of reality as perceived through the lens of time. It suggests that our understanding of past events tends to become more solid and believable as we distance ourselves from them, while our experience of the present is often filled with ambiguity and disbelief, ultimately reminding us that perception plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of truth and reality.
In practice
In a discussion about how memories change over time, this quote could illustrate the fluidity of reality.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
There was a hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
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