How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph) Note that chapters aren't numbered, so need to be numbered manually, 1 to 14.
Quote #1
"Mad! Good God!" He tried to smile. "But you haven't understood a thing, not a single thing. He never for one moment thought that he was mad. If he had he would never have done it. He would still be alive." (3.105)
Madness would have comforted Gibarian, because he would have been able to separate his own version of reality from the really real reality. If your chair got up and danced a jig, would it be more upsetting to think you were imagining things or to think you really had a jig-dancing chair?
Quote #3
There was only one possible explanation, one possible conclusion: madness. Yes, that was it, I had gone mad as soon as I arrived here. Emanations from the ocean had attacked my brain, and hallucination had followed hallucination. (4.88)
Again the suggestion is that it's better to be mad than to have reality go mad on you. Part of the point of Solaris, though, is that you can't always tell the difference—especially in a book which is a fantasy in the first place.
Quote #4
I persuaded myself that she had only been play-acting, that she had wanted to frighten me and had taken an overdose by mistake. (5.37)
Kelvin is acknowledging that the Rheya in his head is not the same as the Rheya in reality. There are multiple Rheyas even before there are multiple Rheyas.
Quote #5
"Certain events, which have actually happened, are horrible, but what is more horrible still is what hasn't happened, what has never existed." (6.80)
Snow is saying that the real reality can be bad, but fantasies or versions of reality that never happened can be worse. This seems to suggest that fiction is worse than fact. Which seems hard to credit; horror movies deefinitely aren't worse than the Holocaust. In any case, since Solaris rather scrambles what's real and what isn't, it's not like Snow can tell the difference between what's happened and what hasn't anyway.
Quote #6
"I saw something which looked like a garden. Yes, a garden. Trees, hedges, paths—but it wasn't a real garden; it was all made of the same substance, which had hardened and by now looked like yellow plaster." (6.180)
Berton sees a garden made by the ocean, and it actually looks like a fake garden. It is a real fake version of reality, and a fake real version of reality both at the same time. You half expect the ocean to make a department store with talking dummies next.
Quote #7
The name he gave them indicates their most astonishing characteristic, the imitation of objects, near or far, external to the ocean itself. (8.55)
Kelvin is talking about mimoids, or structures the ocean builds based on real things. The mimoids are similar to novels in this way: Lem, for instance, writes about people (like Kelvin) who are imitations of real people. And in this case Lem is writing about a mimoid that imitates literature; it's like a mimoid of a mimoid of a mimoid, and so on forever.
Quote #8
"Leave me alone. They aren't real tears." (9.65)
Can a fake person have real emotions? Or to put it another way, are Rheya's emotions real even though she's just a character in a book?
Quote #9
I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance—or rather, I have no body, I am that alien matter. (12.10)
Kelvin is imagining himself essentially in Rheya's position; a consciousness in a non-human body, or a consciousness that is a non-human body. You could say that he's experiencing her feelings of artificiality. Or you could say that she represents or embodies his feelings of artificiality. Alienation is a real feeling; maybe Rheya shows how we are all really aliens to ourselves.
Quote #10
We talked about the future, and our life on Earth on the outskirts of some great city. We would spend the rest of our lives among green trees and under a blue sky, and never leave Earth. Together we planned the lay-out of our house and garden and argued over details like the location of a hedge or a bench. (13.2)
Kelvin and Rheya are sharing a daydream of normality, a happily-ever-after romance ending. This is presented as unreal—or is it? Surely, the life together, never leaving Earth, is actually more real, or more likely, than that Rheya is an alien construct on a distant planet. Romance is more real than science fiction. Right?