Real Life Quotes - Page 22

• Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

  Lorrie Moore

  Real, Mistake, Taken

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.70, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Night, Shadow

  4 Copy quote

• While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

  Anna Quindlen

  Growing Up, Real, Reading

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “How Reading Changed My Life”, p.9, Ballantine Books

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Quotes about Life Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art; to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Life, Death, Dream

  "A Psalm of Life" st. 1 - 2 (1838)

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• It occurred to me, then, how nearly real life resembles the first rehearsal of a play. We are all of us stumbling through it, doing our best to say the proper lines and make the proper moves, but not quite comfortable yet in the parts we've been given. Still, like players who trust that -despite all evidence to the contrary- the whole mess will make sense eventually, we keep on going, hoping that somehow things will work out for the best.

  Gary L. Blackwood

  Real, Moving, Player

  Gary L. Blackwood (2003). “Shakespeare's Spy”, Dutton Childrens Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?

  Ayn Rand

  Real, Writing, Character

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.10, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Real, Suffering, Sorrow

  Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Bishop (2010). “Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children”, p.146, Applewood Books

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Unrequited love is all right in books and things, but in real life, it completely sucks

  Meg Cabot

  Real, Book, Unrequited Love

  Meg Cabot (2009). “Mediator #5: Haunted”, p.219, Zondervan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• But in real life, happily-ever-after is just the beginning. It's where life starts.

  Kay Hooper

  Real, Ever After, Happily Ever After

  Kay Hooper (1984). “If There Be Dragons”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century, Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen's daughter. He would no doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape justice by claiming that society's intolerance for bad-tempered, evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.

  Dean Koontz

  Daughter, Queens, Real

  23 Copy quote

• As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence, and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Real, Men, Occupy Yourself

  "Cakes And Ale".

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as ‘real life,’ a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail.

  David Sedaris

  Wall, Real, People

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Broken Heart, Dream, Real

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “ANNE SHIRLEY Complete Series - ALL 14 Books in One Volume: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Rainbow Valley, The Story Girl, Chronicles of Avonlea and more: Including the Memoirs & Letters of Lucy Maud Montgomery”, p.400, e-artnow

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

  George Saunders

  Art, Real, Black

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.78, A&C Black

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.

  Ian Rankin

  Life, Real, Reading

  6 Copy quote

• I have always been a great dreamer; in dreams I am more active than in my real life, and these shadows sapped me of health and energy.

  Hermann Hesse

  Dream, Real, Shadow

  "Ernest Hemingway, Knut Hamsun [and] Hermann Hesse".

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The miracle of love comes to you in the presence of the uninterpreted moment. If you are mentally somewhere else, you miss real life.

  Byron Katie

  Real, Somewhere Else, Miracle

  16 Copy quote

• Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

  Orson Scott Card

  Real, Reading, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Real, Book, Ideas

  Scarlett Thomas (2008). “The End Of Mr. Y”, p.134, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Graduation, Education, Teacher

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2016). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.71, First Avenue Editions

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Character, People

  19 Copy quote

• I want to be the kind of person who can do that. Move on and forgive people and be healthy and happy. It seems like an easy thing to do in my head. But it's not so easy when you try it in real life.

  Susane Colasanti

  Real, Moving, People

  Susane Colasanti (2009). “Waiting For You”, p.163, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Kiran says (the shelf) is full of stories. If it is, then I like fairy stories. Fairy stories are fair. In them wishes are granted, words are enchanted, the honest and brave make it safely through to the last page and the baddies either have to give up their wickedness for ever and ever, no going back, or get ruthlessly written out of the story, which they hardly ever survive. Also in fairy stories there are hardly any of those half-good half-bad people that crop up so constantly in real life and are so difficult to believe in.

  Hilary McKay

  Giving Up, Real, Believe

  4 Copy quote

• These problems are real, and you can't turn off real life. So I won't try. Instead, I'll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.

  Sean Covey

  Real, Giving, Trying

  Sean Covey (2011). “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teenagers”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the pricesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.

  Paulo Coelho

  Love, Real, Princess

  FaceBook post by Paulo Coelho from Feb 12, 2017

  9 Copy quote

  Show source