Realism Quotes

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find

Rex Stout

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.

Frank Lentricchia

After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.

Guy de Maupassant

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

M.F. Moonzajer

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.

Jane Austen

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

William Dean Howells

No ghosts need

Arthur Conan Doyle

Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way.

Charles Bukowski

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

David Brin

Yes, you may love them to death, but are they willing to love you to life?

Kierra C.T. Banks

to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.

Charles Bukowski

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Paula Fox

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine...And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

Harlan Ellison

And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye.

James Kelman

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

George Lakoff

Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible.

Fanny Britt

When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps." John Hay

John Taliaferro

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

Ron Suskind

The standards of judgement must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

Saul D. Alinsky

The threats that resurfaced in the past 10 years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism or one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced. The president can and should speak of foreseeing an era in which these threats don't exist, but you must not believe his own rhetoric. To the contrary, he must gradually ease the country away from the idea that threats to imperial power will ever subside, then l lead it to an understanding that these threats are the price Americans pay for the wealth and power they hold.

George Friedman

Mental and emotional freedom is not the denial of truth — it’s the recognition that truth isn't something we need to run from or be afraid of.

T.K. Coleman

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.

Anaïs Nin

With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.

Leo Tolstoy

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

Charles Bukowski

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

Oscar Wilde

Don’t let realism keep you from doing what you feel you need to do, even if you think it’s hopeless.

A.J. Darkholme

When you feel hatred towards your life, hate it. See how it will actually do something to your life.

Ade Santi

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

Flannery O'Connor

Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.

Stephen King

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

Timothy J. Keller

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

Richard M. Weaver

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

Donald Miller

Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy....

James S.A. Corey

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for.

C. JoyBell C.

Some people see the liquid and thing half full. Others only see the air and think half empty. Sometimes I get the sense Chatham sees it all, which is kind of terrifying. I don't know if I want him to see me--the real me.

McCall Hoyle

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Will Durant

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey—and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

George Gaylord Simpson

You'd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn't you, Comrade Sergeant?' said Reg encouragingly.'I'd like a hard-boiled egg,' said Vimes, shaking the match out.There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended.'In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher--''Well, yes, we could,' said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of papers in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. 'But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.

Terry Pratchett

When love carries us away on its brittle wings, we are too intoxicated to comprehend its power. We just want to soar and feel its adventurous spirit. The realistic aspect of love is not that romantic.

Balroop Singh

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist real

Vera Nazarian

As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.

James Madison

Who's crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don't?

Lenore Skenazy

The truth ain't pretty. That's how you can identify it.

The Unit

In our effort to be honest about our problems, it is not necessary that we cease to be mindful of our potential.

T.K. Coleman

Aren't 3,000 lives worth a miracle to a good and all-powerful god?

Zack Love

For every person who rides with a moral high-horse, they also have a dead horse that they haven't fed lying somewhere out of sight.

Zack W. Van

You need to manage your expectations. You'll live longer.

The Unit

Nothing I do is natural, realistic, organic or accidental. I'm never spontaneous, I'm completely premeditated.

Nuno Roque

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.

Ursula K Le Guin

When the emergency brappers went of they did what any dedicated, well-trained and quick-minded Service personnel would do; they paniced.From the short story What Makes Us Human.

Stephen R. Donaldson

We are not often against the evils, only because our enemies are against them.

M.F. Moonzajer

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

Philip Zaleski

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O'Keeffe

When you make a film, if you are an insider, you're usually the last person to know that your film is not right. But when you are an outsider, you have a little more objectivity.I think a part of my success is that I am naturally objective. I am not an insider.In many ways, Anupama is the same.Foreword, First Day First Show

Shah Rukh Khan

Get your life. Because while you are neglecting yourself for whatever cause, that is exactly what everyone else is doing -- children, spouse, co-workers, etc.

Holland Meissner

They worried that fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical realities.

Ransom Riggs

Think I'll miss you forever,Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky.

Lana Del Rey

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.

A.A. Milne

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

George Saunders

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.

Charles Finch

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Realism Quotes

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