46 Quotes Tagged: realism

The future ain't what it used to be.

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

"I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself."

There are always loose ends in real life.

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations — the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience.

"For a while he sat idly outside his door brooding in the spring sun.

In "The Lost Phoebe"."

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Pedro da Maia amava! Era um amor à Romeu, vindo de repente numa troca de olhares fatal e deslumbradora, uma dessas paixões que assaltam uma existência, a assolam como um furacão, arrancando a vontade, a razão, os respeitos humanos e empurrando-os de roldão aos abismos.

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

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

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

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 again.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail

To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.