Realism Quotes

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
― Betrand Russell

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Realism can break a writer's heart.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shame

“People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'"

[What It Is (2009)]”
― Dylan Moran

“Maybe we should always assume the worst.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“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, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“I also felt that Ron and Hermione would have gotten divorced. I'm sorry, I just do. The end of Harry Potter did feel ultimately to me...just the fact everybody had married everybody. The books were so real and so grounded in what things are really like when you're that age, she nailed that so beautifully. And then there was this slightly fantastical ending. I know that was there for her to say, 'Really, I mean it, no more books,' but you do sort of go, people who were in a war are different from people who haven't been, and how does it affect them? But am I going to second-guess my favorite writer? I think not.”
― Joss Whedon

“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.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“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, Pride and Prejudice

“Think I'll miss you forever,
Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky.”
― Lana Del Rey

“Are not all religions strange to those who stand outside of them?”
― Christopher Paolini, Brisingr

“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“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, Night Watch

“I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.”
― Jim Butcher, Blood Rites

“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, The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective

“There are always loose ends in real life.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“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.”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Who's crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don't?”
― Lenore Skenazy

“You want fantasy? Here's one... There's this species that lives on a planet a few miles above molten rock and a few miles below a vacuum that'd suck the air right out of them. They live in a brief geological period between ice ages, when giant asteroids have temporarily stopped smacking into the surface. As far as they can tell, there's nowhere else in the universe where they could stay alive for ten seconds.
And what do they call their fragile little slice of space and time? They call it real life.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“Your strength will be found when you stop struggling with yourself, instead of thinking everyone is a struggle worth overcoming. Every obstacle in life is a lesson that teaches us, not others.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“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.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Flotsam

“I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”
― Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sang of Murder