Realism Quotes - Page 2

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.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.
She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

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.

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.

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.

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

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

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

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.

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.

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.")

Moral writing is boring.

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.

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

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.