Quotes About Realism

When you're a kid you have these notions about how things are going to be.... You get a little older and you pull back on some of that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.

You can't expect the wolf to turn vegetarian because of one Pup.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. William Shakespeare, Sonnets, No. 130

Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck.

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That's realism, but everyone whose hopes weren't dashed started off by having hope. Hope's the price of admission.

I take it you don't believe in love at first sight." "Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?" "I don't, no," Darcy said. "But I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced firsthand.

Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to be all sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they're all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren't flawless but also aren't ridiculous or incompetent at life.

I take it you don't believe in love at first sight.' 'Does anyone over the age of thirteen? Do you?' 'I don't, no,' Darcy said. 'But I don't rule out for others what I haven't experienced first hand.

I wasn't a cynic; I was a banged-up realist.

Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.

What is called realism is usually a record of life at a low pitch and ebb viewed in the sunless light of day.

never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky's luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.

he was practical about what he wanted in a wife. Deborah was rather plain, but she offered the prospect of comfort and domesticity.

Life is not fair; get used to it.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

Pessimist, are you?" "I'm a doctor. That makes me an optimist with realistic notions.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that what passes for realism in movies has nothing to do with reality and that my stuff is more realistic than that.

I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.

That was reality and as is often the case, reality sucks.

If it is too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

This world is not a Sunday School; it is a slaughter-house, and always has been. Peace or war, what does it matter? There is no such thing as peace, and never can be. Competition is just peaceful war with far more cruel weapons than either shot or shell. War is competition stripped of all disguise — without the velvet glove.