The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it is only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

-- Chuck Palahniuk

[found by way of David Heavenor's tumblelog]

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It is that you can see the world as it isn't. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place.

-- Kathryn Schulz, in this rather fascinating TED talk