Realism Quotes
Michel Houellebecq
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
1578Don DeLillo
When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
4917Keary Taylor
There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn't talk. But if I hadn't gotten drunk that night, if I hadn't gotten in that accident, would I have ever had this moment? Lying there in the sun, holding Sam's hand like time didn't exist and the real world couldn't touch us?
Somehow I didn't think so.
2830Eugène Ionesco
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
4769Erich Maria Remarque
A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
4027Erich Maria Remarque
Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
2302Bertrand Russell
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
1193George Lakoff
For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.
3228Zack Love
Aren't 3,000 lives worth a miracle to a good and all-powerful god?
3218Perry Anderson
[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.
2898Thomas Hardy
On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
3057Edmund Burke
The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.
4548Michael Richardson
Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.
2522Terry Pratchett
It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.
1793Ruth Dugdall
...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.
4197Michael Bassey Johnson
Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.
1818Keary Taylor
Reality hasn't really sunk in yet, I knew that. I didn't want to know what life was going to feel like when it finally did.
4808Oscar Wilde
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.
3324Joris-Karl Huysmans
I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
2118Erich Maria Remarque
It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
2189Erich Maria Remarque
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
1231Núria Añó
She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.
1796Paula Fox
You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.
4114Charlotte Brontë
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
1527Charlotte Brontë
I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.
3888David Brin
Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
1902Paul S. Anderson
We want to believe that this life is longer than it is, but in the grand scheme of the universe our existence equals the amount of time it takes a warm breeze to blow through your hair on a spring day.
2461Vinnie Tesla
Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive.
1000George Sand
La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."
("Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.")
1754Charles Finch
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.
4454George Saunders
. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.
2511Charlotte Brontë
I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
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