Quotes about realization
page 7

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

“I think I needed to be really hurt on the outside so the hurt on the inside would realize that it wasn’t on its own and that it had to come out.”

Sarra Manning (1950) British writer

Thinking, Hurt

“Most people fail to realize that in life, it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you keep.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki book Rich Dad Poor Dad

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Life, Money, People

“The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Love, Happiness, Suffering, Help

“… this time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Silence, Memory, Time

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.”

Toni Morrison book God Help the Child

Source: God Help the Child

People, Music, Thinking, Silence

“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

“And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.”

George Carlin book Brain Droppings

Source: Brain Droppings

Law

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Source: Summer Rain

Memory

“I knew from the moment I heard you, the moment I saw the gun and realized that this lovely, petit woman was the executioner, that you would never die waiting for me to save you - that you would save yourself.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Narcissus in Chains

Source: Narcissus in Chains

Love, Waiting

“I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Death, Wisdom, People, Age

“A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Angels, Learning

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love, Idea

“I tell myself that I know you,
and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Lucky One

Source: The Lucky One

Thinking

“What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your.”

Barbara Ehrenreich book Nickel and Dimed

Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Time

“Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Happiness, Hope, Reality

“But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

Life, People, Thinking, Waiting

“For the first time I realize how perilous peace can be. I appreciate the tightrope that my grandfather has spent his whole life trying to walk. And now, more than ever, I grow terrified that I'm going to make us all fall down.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

Life, Peace, Time

“People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

Source: Night Film

Life, People, Change

“I will be” is a confession that “I am not “ The Father's will is always “I AM.” Until you realize that YOU are the Father (there is only one I AM and your infinite self is that I AM), your will is always “I will be.”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

Source: The Power of Awareness

“Don't do this to us." He warned, his voice hoarse with angry desperation as he realize he was losing her. "You're letting eleven years of mistrust color everything you've discovered I've done".”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Paradise

Color

“There is nothing more liberating than having your worst fear realized.”

Conan O'Brien (1963) American television show host and comedian

Fear

“Anybody who has the courage to raise his eyes and look sanely at the awful human condition… must realize finally that tiny periods of temporary release from intolerable suffering is the most that any individual has the right to expect.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Courage, Suffering

“I realized it was like looking into the sun—you shouldn't do it, because you'd turn your face away and be blind to everything else.”

Jodi Picoult book Picture Perfect

Source: Picture Perfect

Sun

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Star, Communication, Universe, Night

“It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. (Narrator)”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Variant: It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.
Source: Fight Club

Love, Cry

“You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Variant: You can live your whole life not realising that what you're looking for is right in front of you.
Source: One Day

Life

“… I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you.”

Nicole Krauss (1974) American novelist

Parent, Time

“For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Law, Confidence, Nature

“Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Understanding, Time

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

Past, Future

“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience

People, Thinking, Universe, Time

“I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

“She looked at him with loathing. "I knew you were crazy," she said. "But I didn't realize you were absolutely, spectactularly out of your goddamned mind.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Fear, Light

“My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances”

Alice Hoffman book Practical Magic

Source: Practical Magic

Girl, Courage

“Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize… Vienna waits for you.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Vienna.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)
Context: But you know you can't always see when you're right
You got your passion you got your pride
But don't you know only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

Dreams, Imagination, Waiting

“He nodded and curled over his paper, writing quickly. As his words took form on the white page, she got to watch him… and realized she never wanted him to go. She wanted him here beside her forever.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

“You many have noticed I have a temper… but when I calmed down, I realized that this world, blighted and imperfect as it is, would be better with you in it.”

Jasper Fforde (1961) British novelist

Source: Shades of Grey

World

“It's a funny feeling, being suddenly airborne. Just as you realize it, it's over, and you're sinking.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Feeling

“Sometimes, mothers say and do things that seem like they don't want their kids… but when you look more closely, you realize that they're doing those kids a favor. They're just trying to give them a better life.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Life

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”

Louise Erdrich book The Round House

Source: The Round House

Women, Men

“I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 1 (pp. 29-30)

Sadness, Star

“What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Understanding

“In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent.”

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

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

“He had lost control over his own body, he realized dully.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Icebound Land

“An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else…”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

Life, Fools, Thinking

“Once I'm on my feet I realize escape might not be so easy.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“My nightmares are usually about losing you. I'm okay once I realize you're here.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

People, Music, Thinking, Sense

“We learn our lessons; we get hurt; we want revenge. Then we realize that actually, happiness and forgiving people is the best revenge.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Happiness, People, Forgiveness, Revenge

“He realized… that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.”

Isabel Allende book Zorro

Source: Zorro

Sincerity

“You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Boy

“Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.”

Bill Moyers (1934) American journalist

Freedom, Time

“Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.”

Jonathan Coe book The Dwarves of Death

Source: The Dwarves of Death

People, World

“Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

God, Truth, Despair

“But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

People, Problem

“In the end, I stopped worrying about how strange you seemed. I realized that it didn't really matter if I understood you, because I trusted you.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

“And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

“Absolutely everything you experience in your life is a result of what you have given in your thoughts and feelings, whether you realize you have given them or not.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Power

Source: The Power

Life, Feeling

“Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

As quoted in What Color is Your Paradigm: Thinking for Shaping Life and Results (2003) by Howard Edson, p. 184
Source: The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marx

Communication

“This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Home, Strong, Reading, Personality

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Dreams, Imagination, History, Effort

“It was a strange thing, this feeling of empathy. He'd never experienced it before. He realized that what hurt this woman hurt him as well, that what made her bleed caused a hemorrhage of pain within his soul.”

Elizabeth Hoyt (1970) American writer

Source: Wicked Intentions

Pain, Feeling, Soul, Hurt

“Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Mood, Personality

“Wait."
"So what am I supposed to do now?"

"You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey."

(222-223)”

Gene Luen Yang American Born Chinese

Source: American Born Chinese

Mountain, Waiting

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”

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

World, Science

“I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it sis my duty… This is my highest and best use as a human.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Life, Help

“You've been avoiding me," he said, talking to the sandwich.

I laughed. He looked over at me. "Sorry. I just realized that you talk to a lot of inanimate objects.”

Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author

Source: Snowed In

“Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Source: Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

Life, Death

“Old age means realizing you will never own all the dogs you wanted to.”

Joe Gores (1931–2011) American writer

Age, Dogs

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”

Jean Genet (1910–1986) French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist

Youth, Dreams

“But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gain-said.”

Agatha Christie And Then There Were None

Source: And Then There Were None

Art, Nature

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

Source: Our Town

Life

“The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Sloppy Firsts

School

“Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

People, Training

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Nature

“I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Death, Time, Hurt

“Wisdom's daughter walks alone.
That didn't just mean without other people, Annabeth realized. It meant without any special powers.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Wisdom, People, Daughters

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

Hostility, Travel, Communication, Sense

“She woke up and realized she had forgotten the definition of the word ‘impossible.’ She decided it must not have been that important.”

Monique Duval (1924–2014) Canadian journalist

Source: The Persistence of Yellow: A Book of Recipes for Life

“We do not realize the sound the world makes -- unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

World

“Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Sense

“When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure - but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Failure, Success

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Something Fresh

Source: Something Fresh

Life, Happiness, People, Pleasure

“When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them.”

Shirley Hazzard book The Transit of Venus

Source: The Transit of Venus

Love, Hurt

“I realized that I was really tired of people popping on and off of my property like it was a train station on the supernatural railroad.”

Charlaine Harris Dead and Gone

Source: Dead and Gone

People, Training

“The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”

Michael Cunningham book A Home at the End of the World

Source: A Home at the End of the World

Secret, Law

“God help him." He chortled. "He doesn't realize he loves her. And even if he did, he wouldn't admitted it."
-Dr. Whitticomb”

Judith McNaught book Whitney, My Love

Source: Whitney, My Love

Love, God, Help

“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

World, Parent, Time, Dead

“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

God

“It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.”

Irvine Welsh book Marabou Stork Nightmares

Source: Marabou Stork Nightmares

Understanding

“She knew more about these situations than she realized, he thought. She'd spent years at Duncan's side. "When in doubt," he added, "be pompous.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Erak's Ransom

“As he bent closer, he realized they were words -- words his wife had carved into the cave ice with the last of her dying strength. As he read them, he felt them like three hard blows in the stomach.
KILL THE CHILD”

Holly Black book The Iron Trial

Source: The Iron Trial

Reading

“It's kind of silly to feel so disappointed about something you only just realized you wanted, isn't it?”

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

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Disappointment, Feeling

“I realize only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Personality

“There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.”

Nicole Krauss book Great House

Source: Great House

Time

“He didn't say anything more, just waited for me to tell him what I'd been thinking. It was pure speculation, and I was opening myself up to ridicule by saying anything at all. I sat on the stool and realized that I had my loyalties, too.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Thinking, Waiting, Loyalty

“During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Source: The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang-Tzu
Context: How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

Dreams

Quotes about realization page 7

Quotes about realization
page 7