All Quotes By Tag: Realism

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”

“The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.”

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art – the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer’s unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”

“My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.”

“When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.”

“The people are like an audience watching a drama. They have characters whose sides they chose even before the start of the show, but they know little or nothing about the people behind the stage―the manipulators.”

“I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn’t have a chance. The fix was in. I didn’t know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he’s packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts.”

“The saddest instance of the lack of real freedom, arising from the lack of real knowledge, is revealed to us in Leo Tolstoy’s latest work, a work which at the same time, by virtue of its creative, poetic force, ranks almost first among all that has appeared in Russian literature since 1840. No! without culture, without freedom in the widest sense, freedom within oneself, freedom from preconceived ideas, freedom with regard to one’s own nation and history, without this, the real artist is unthinkable; without this free air he cannot breathe.”

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

“Realism can break a writer’s heart.”

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

“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 believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that’s out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty!”

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

“The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience … The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won’t sue.”

“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 estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”