Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don’t smile much. Nominalists have more fun. They are known...

(…) Qual sera o destino de Helène? O meu, certamente. Que meios têm as mães de assegurar às suas filhas que o homem ao qual elas serão entregues será o esposo de seus corações? As...

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist – life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist...

Hell, I’d even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year,...

Here’s the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives...

The truth ain’t pretty. That’s how you can identify it.

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

Who’s crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don’t?

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced...

Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn’t true, would you hit him...

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn’t real. It’s real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if...

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

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...

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...

You need to manage your expectations. You’ll live longer.

The cinema that interests me departs from realism.

With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to...

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a...

One must always account for the vagaries of truth.

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...

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in...

Do you believe,” said Candide, “that men have always slaughtered each other as they do today, that they’ve always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates and thieves, weak, fickle, cowardly, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloodthirsty,...

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them — are ruinous!

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what’s beyond ahead.

There are always loose ends in real life.

Mothers do not have love affairs. Before their children they have dreams, and after their children they have delusions. If the father is involved somewhere, they have fantasies.

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu’un roman ne ressemble à la vie.”(“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”)

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.

We want to believe that this life is longer than it is, but in the grand scheme of the universe our existence equals the amount of time it takes a warm breeze to blow through...

A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its “resting state” in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over...

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And...

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and...

Think I’ll miss you forever,Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky.

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become...

On avoiding the darker side of life in educational literature for children: “There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the atomic bomb. Since it is likely...

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I...

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...

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting...

Reality hasn’t really sunk in yet, I knew that. I didn’t want to know what life was going to feel like when it finally did.

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a...

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...

Madness is loving the unsolvable puzzle of your soul and replacing the lost pieces with my own.