“Bitterness is the outcome of a wrong mental movement - the attempt to force external events to conform to internal fantasy. The cure is to see fantasy as fantasy, which will reveal it as neither necessary nor rewarding.”
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Vernon Howard 53
American writer 1918–1992Related quotes
Source: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997), p. 14

Sometimes a Fantasy.
Song lyrics, Glass Houses (1980)

“… fantasy is not practice for what is real—fantasy is the opiate of women.”
Source: Austenland

“They see it for what it is… It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.”
As quoted in "Success of Harry Potter bowls author over" at CNN.com (21 October 1999) http://www.cnn.com/books/news/9910/21/rowling.intvu/; also quoted in "Urban Legends Reference Pages : Harry Potter" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/potter.asp
1990s
Context: I absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. … I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd.
I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, "Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch." They see it for what it is... It is a fantasy world and they understand that completely.

After having dreams about physical terms, which he initially dismissed as a "misuse of physics terminology" by the unconscious, in a letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948)
Context: Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies … Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.

“If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.”
"Letters" (p. 143).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43
L'Âme et la danse (1921)