Quotes about real
page 15

“We are frightfully concerned with our own deaths, sometimes so much so that we forget the real purpose of our lives”

Source: Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives

Death, Forgetting

“Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Love, Way, Change, Time

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

People, World

“A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.”

Yann Martel book Beatrice and Virgil

Source: Beatrice and Virgil

Art

“There is real comfort in being quiet.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

“I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Written on the Body

Way

“Man, you cannot be real," the human said softly.
"Why not?"
"You just can't."
She laughed a little. "Well, I am." He cleared his throat again. Offered her a lopsided grin.
"Mind if I ask you to prove it?"
"How?"
"Can I touch your hair?”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

“The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about “it” is in your mind and your
to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST”

Gregory Hill (1941–2000) American writer and founder of Discordianism

Source: Principia Discordia ● Or ● How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger

Art, Reality

“There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Secret, World

“And for a second, just for a second I forget. I forget that this isn't real.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Forgetting

“Harry Dresden: I can't believe I'm about to say this. So think real careful about where this is coming from: Have you people ever considered talking when you've got a problem?”

Jim Butcher Turn Coat

Source: The Dresden Files, Turn Coat (2009), Chapter 23

People, Problem, Thinking

“When I first discovered the moon, he said, I gave it a different name. But everyone kept calling it the moon. The real name never caught on.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

Source: "Faulkner and Desegregation" in Partisan Review (Fall 1956); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
Context: Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

World, Change, Loss

“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Home, Light, Water, Parting

“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad."
"No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

Sadness

“Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.”

Jeff Lindsay book Dearly Devoted Dexter

Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter

Learning

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

World, Feeling, Reading, Night

“Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying”

Holly Black book White Cat

Source: White Cat

Lie, Secret, Lying

“But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Stupidity, Sadness, Feeling, Dead

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Feeling, Suicide

“[…]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Guy, Sun, Fight, Hurt

“A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Light

“… people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

People, Music, Imagination, Reality

“Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Life, World

“We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"We ReaI CooI" , The Bean Eaters (1960)
The "We"—you're supposed to stop after the "We" and think about their validity, and of course there's no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don't bother to question every day, of course.
"An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)
The WEs in "We Real Cool" are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative "Kilroy-is-here" announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the "We" softly.
Report from Part One (1972)
Source: Selected Poems

School, Singing

“This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Personality

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Variant: I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.
Source: Brave New World

God, Freedom

“We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Happiness, World

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Learning

“Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

People, Fear, Help, Selfishness

“Like death, his father's presence was cold and often callous, but it was real -- brutally honest, inescapably dependable.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Death, Dependency

“In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Pleasure, World, Beauty, Fraud

“Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given and that’s the secret.”

Jonathan Carroll book White Apples

Source: White Apples

Love, Secret

“Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Beauty, Personality

“We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.”

Anna Deavere Smith (1950) American actress, playwright and professor

Time

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

God, Children, Justice, Democracy

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

Neal Stephenson book Quicksilver

Source: Quicksilver

People, World, Flying

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Past

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

World

“We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Daughter of the Blood

“Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

People, History, Time, Success

“The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Past, Hurt

“You've asked me out tons of times."
"Not really. I've made inappropriate suggestions and frequently pushed for nudity. But I've never asked you out on a real date.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

Time

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

World, Beauty, Personality

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation

Source: Foundation

Fools

“I think beauty comes from actually knowing who you are. That's real beauty to me.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Beauty, Thinking

“I go wherever you go,' he says, launching us into the water.
This is our start. This is the moment it becomes real. We are married. We are infinite. Me and Conrad. The first boy I ever slow danced with, ever cried over. Ever loved.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: We'll Always Have Summer

Love, Boy, Water, Dance

“Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Love, Change

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Life, Feeling, Game, Universe

“We know it's all just daydreaming… But sometimes, it'd be nice just to hold something real in your hands that felt like a measure of your worth.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

“In real life, love has to be possible. Even if it is not returned right away, love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Love, Life, Hope, Personality

“We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

World, Time

“Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Age, Feeling, Falseness

“Action is the real measure of intelligence.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

Intelligence

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Appetites: Why Women Want

Life, World, Learning, Waiting

“My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Problem

“Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.”

Sogyal Rinpoche book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Source: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Truth, Intelligence, Gratitude

“The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.”

Stephen King book Rose Madder

Source: Rose Madder

World, Dreams, Sleep

“Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you."
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Guy, Fight, Personality

“Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Nothing of real worth can ever be bought. Love, friendship, honour, valour, respect. All these things have to be earned.”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Source: Shield of Thunder

Love, Friendship

“we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Happiness, Feeling

“It's scary when it's real. When it's not just thinking about a person, but, like, having a real live person in front of you, with, like, expectations. And wants.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Thinking, Personality

“Real power comes not from hate, but from truth.”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Hate, Truth

“There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Rappaccini's Daughter

Source: Rappaccini's Daughter

“Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn't mean is isn't real, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, doesn't mean it doesn't matter, but basically, we're talking a practice swing in the big game of love.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Faking It

Love, Life, People, Game

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969).
Source: Contingencies Of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis

Men, Question, Thinking

“Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Shadow

Source: Ender's Shadow

Love, Hunger, Family, Food

“She whispered, 'C'etait la Verite?' Was that Verity? Or perhaps she just meant, Was that the truth? Was it true? Did any of it really happen? Were the last three hours real? 'Yes,' I whispered back. 'Oui. C'etait la verite.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Truth

“The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 2 : Writing for the Stage, p. 72

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

“To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation and when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Universe, Help, Personality

“Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

World, Light

“Faith is accepting what makes no sense, what we cannot prove, but know down deep in our souls is real.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Bumped

Faith, Soul, Sense

“It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Love, Pain, Thinking

“When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Dreams, Disappointment

“The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.”

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) English novelist

Life, Effort

“There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Life, Sense

“I'd kind of expected that kids who knew about the Real World wouldn't act like jock dipwads. Guess I was wrong.”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Betrayals

World

“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Theory of Religion

Life, Death, World

“… real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.”

Emma Donoghue (1969) Irish novelist, playwright, short-story writer and historian

Thinking, Loneliness

“Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Way, Boy

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

Source: My Life on the Road

Life, Way, Reality, Heart

“The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.”

Melissa de la Cruz book The Van Alen Legacy

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

World

“Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Life

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

People

“Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?

I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tacit approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Women, Way

“That's not a real answer.'
Says who?'
Says me. I mean real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence.'
Clowns.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

Death, Fear, Failure, Question

“And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Love

“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

Source: Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

Life

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

Thinking, Reading

“Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.”

C. Terry Warner American writer

Source: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

Truth, Thinking, Reality, Learning

“Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: I. Asimov

Life, Business

“The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”

Alan Moore book From Hell

Source: From Hell

God

“The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth (book), Ch. 2 : The Journey Inward
Context: One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

Light