Realism Quotes

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.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

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.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

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.

There are always loose ends in real life.

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.

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!

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!

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

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

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

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

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.

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

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.

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.

One must always account for the vagaries of truth.

...that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.