Best 255 quotes in «real life quotes» category

Oh, you mean like Orpheo rescuing Euniphon from the Underworld?” said Roland. Rob Anybody just stared. “It’s a myth from Ephebe,” Roland went on. “It’s supposed to be a love story, but it’s really a metaphor for the annual return of summer. There’s a lot of versions of that story.” (...) “A metaphor is a kind o’ lie to help people understand what’s true,” said Billy Bigchin, but this didn’t help much.

Real life doesn't grant us many of the more than useful possibilities people can come out with in fiction.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: it teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it to one degree or another. (Harry Dresden's internal monologue in White Knight)

realize what you are not doing and dare to do what you are not doing. What distinctive thing are you not doing?

Real life is messy and hard and never turns out like I’ve imagined. Usually it’s better. So, I try not to dream but rather to pray. If there is one thing I know, it’s that I have no clue what I want. I’m fickle. I’m picky. And I’m scared of a lot of things. Especially commitment.

Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work.

Please read my dads book 'wounded rangers'.

Reality wins, and I'd rather see the truth than stay in love with a fantasy.

Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.

Real life doesn't always sound like it should.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly.

Real life... Witches: Wiccan practitioners. Werewolves: rare strain of rabies. Zombies: Prions/Plague. Vampires: Hemophilia/Porphyria

Science,’ he informed me, ‘might not yet have all the answers, but it is the only verifiable—and hence meaningful—way of asking the right questions.’ ‘But those questions are nearly always asked through the voices of materialism, mechanism, and reduction. Has it occurred to you that the only aspects of the universe that such an approach will reveal are those that are materialistic, mechanistic, and reductionist?’ ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he countered, ‘that the universe really is nothing more than matter and energy, which we can understand through, and only through, analysis?’ I suddenly felt like launching myself out of the pool and landing on top of him. Instead I said, ‘And analyzing as you scientists do, every year you understand more and more about less and less until someday you will know everything about nothing.

See yourself while crying this is only things that no man wants.

She peered out after a moment; he was staring fixedly across the cut, with his gun resting on his left forearm. He raised it abruptly and fired twice more, waited, shrugged, and then trudged off. Quietly sat watching him in utter amazement and disgust. Far off on the hillside she could discern the jerky motions of a rock-squirrel kicking and kicking its life away. The man had hit it with his first bullet, and had fired again as it writhed there. It was wanton; it was useless. Quietly felt no particular pity for the animal; she was not a sentimentalist, and had a scale of values for the lower orders. What offended her was the waste of a life, of powder, even of skill—the skill of the man himself and that of the precision workers who had made his weapon. He had not wanted the creature for fur or flesh, but had as his only apparent desire an affirmation of the evident fact that he was bigger and stronger and more intelligent than a chipmunk. Enter civilization she would, but not in the company of this pervert.

Some cats are angry at being called cats. To achieve peace with them, never call them by their real name

She said, “Look me right in the eye, and tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll go.” He stared at her. “Miss, I do not love you.” “Don’t give me that rot! I’m coming with you, and that’s final!” “Daphne, you just said that if I said…” “That doesn’t count! I said look me right in the eye! You were staring at my nose!

Slow and steady wins the race' sounds good only in story books. In real life, aim to be the hare who does not stop to rest.

She sat back again, a gentle loosening that made her straight spine seem effortless and restful. Again she did nothing. She simply sat across from me and unfurled herself. I felt her life brush up against me and flow around me. It was but the faintest touching, and had I not experienced both the Skill and the Wit, I do not think I would have sensed it. Cautiously, as softly as if I assayed a bridge made of cobweb, I overlay my senses on hers. She quested. Not as I did, toward a specific beast, or to read what might be close by. I discarded the word I had always given to my sensing. Kettricken did not seek after anything with her Wit. It was as she said, simply a being, but it was being a part of the whole. She composed herself and considered all the ways the great web touched her, and was content. It was a delicate and tenuous thing and I marveled at it. For an instant I, too, relaxed. I breathed out. I opened myself, Wit wide to all. I discarded all caution, all worry that Burrich would sense me. I had never done anything to compare it with before. Kettricken's reaching was as delicate as droplets of dew sliding down a strand of spiderweb. I was like a dammed flood, suddenly released, to rush out to fill old channels to overflowing and to send fingers of water investigating the lowlands. Let us hunt! The Wolf, joyfully. In the stables, Burrich straightened from cleaning a hoof, to frown at no one. Sooty stamped in her stall. Molly shrugged away and shook out her hair. Across from me, Kettricken started and looked at me as if I had spoken aloud. A moment more I was held, seized from a thousand sides, stretched and expanded, illuminated pitilessly. I felt it all, not just the human folk with their comings and goings, but every pigeon that fluttered in the eaves, every mouse that crept unnoticed behind the wine kegs, every speck of life, that was not and never had been a speck, but had always been a node on the web of life. Nothing alone, nothing forsaken, nothing without meaning, nothing of no significance, and nothing of importance.

Some people start to live when they die

Sonya's a real person, like your Mother. Thirty years ago, that was your Mother's biggest flaw in my eyes, and now that's the thing I love most about Sonya. It's funny how things end, isn't it?

Somethings are simply better left the way they are.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

So what’s the test?" "Ah, that’s the trick of it. It’s not a test. It’s real life.

Sometimes the rope seems the only option when at the bottom of the pit. Climb it to safety.

Such a weird thing, isn't it.... to walk around for days every month bleeding. As girls, to just accept that a certain amount of our time will be spent cleaning up gore expelled from our own bodies, part of our income spent buying mass-produced bits of cotton wool to soak it up, part of our minds spent tracking, remembering and planning so that no one ever notices we're temporarily transformed into victims of satanic possession, blood gushing out of our uninjured bodies.... waking up at night with stuff of life smeared all over sheets, like you're in the middle of a fucking crime scene... Oh it's fine, it's normal. Jesus! No wonder men back away in fear.

Stories were made up and spun in the evenings in rooms smelling of melting lard and fried onions, village halls, smoky taverns, roadhouses, crofts, tar kilns, forest homesteads and border watchtowers. Tales were spun and told. About war. About heroism and chivalry. About friendship and hatred. About wickedness and betrayal. About faithful and genuine love, about the love that always triumphs. About the crimes and punishments that always befall criminals. About justice that is always just. About truth, which always rises to the surface like oil. Tales were told; people rejoiced in them. Enjoyed the fairy-tale fictions. Because, indeed, all around, in real life, things happened entirely back to front.

Strike experienced a moment of pure clarity: he would never make it out of here, would never rise above his current position as Rodney’s lieutenant, because all the intelligence and prudence and vision came to nothing if it wasn’t tempered and supported by a certain blindness, an oblivious animal will that Rodney had, that he, Strike, did not have. Rodney would survive all this not because of his guts or his brains, but because he understood that there was no real life out here on the street, no real lives other than his own, and that what really mattered was coming first in all things, in all ways and at all costs.

The critical point is that thousands of people are swept into the criminal justice system every year pursuant to the drug war without much regard for their guilt or innocence. The police are allowed by the courts to conduct fishing expeditions for drugs on the streets and freeways based on nothing more than a hunch...and once inside the system, people are often denied attorneys or meaningful representation and pressured into plea bargains by the threat of unbelievably harsh sentences - sentences for minor drug crimes that are higher than many countries impose on convicted murderers. This is the way the roundup works, and it works this way in virtually every major city in the United States.

The argument was this: a civilization shackled to the strictures of excessive control on its populace, from choice of religion through to the production of goods, will sap the will and the ingenuity of its people – for whom such qualities are no longer given sufficient incentive or reward. At face value, this is accurate enough. Trouble arrives when the opponents to such a system institute its extreme opposite, where individualism becomes godlike and sacrosanct, and no greater service to any other ideal (including community) is possible. In such a system rapacious greed thrives behind the guise of freedom, and the worst aspects of human nature come to the fore, a kind of intransigence as fierce and nonsensical as its maternalistic counterpart. And so, in the clash of these two extreme systems, one is witness to brute stupidity and blood-splashed insensitivity; two belligerent faces glowering at each other across the unfathomed distance, and yet, in deed and in fanatic regard, they are but mirror reflections. This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetically idiotic…

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

Tentacles is my term — the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary war, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and email for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing — homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

The filmmaking process taught me that I need to be authentic—in my scripts and in real life.

There are two important days in your life. The day you discovered you were alive and the day you forgot about it

The great thing about real life is that it belongs to you. You can make it up as you go along!

The hardest thing in life is a man to be honest with himself

The individual is reminded that in him, no less than in the Archetypal Universe, real life must be born if real life is to be lived.

Then nothing became something, and I was born, and I wrought great havoc in the world in the time allotted to me, and I returned to nothingness

Then we are nothing to him,’ said the merchant, sorrow brimming in his eyes. ‘I surrendered everything, all my wealth, for yet another indifferent god. If he cannot protect us, what is the point?’ She wished that she had an answer to such questions. Were these not the very grist of priestly endeavours? To grind out palatable answers, to hint of promising paths to true salvation? To show a benign countenance gifted by god-given wisdom, glowing as if fanned by sacred breath? ‘It is my feeling,’ she said, haltingly, ‘that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.’ She held up a hand to still the objections she saw awakened among these six honest, serious believers. ‘Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives? For it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls. Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number, grow into a multitude, until you are as an army. But there will be, will ever be, those who turn away from your hand. The ones who quest because it is in their nature to quest, who fear the seduction of self-satisfaction, who mistrust easy answers. Are these ones then to be your enemy? Does the army grow angered now? Does it strike out at the unbelievers? Does it crush them underfoot?

The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her over and over until at last the cleaning woman scares it by yelling: "Motherfucker!

The real world reveals itself like surprise gifts on our doorstep, special moments that seem above and beyond the reality of others. These times are full, beautiful and meaningful beyond words, even when wrapped in pain.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

the great mountain when seen from a distance shall always seem closer to us but to get to it, and to climb to its apex to get the best view, we may need to take and experience the real walk with resilience and tenacity.

The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child eating his ice cream so slowly that he couldn't taste it at all.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.

The real life is not before you; the real life is not behind you; the real life, dear friend is where you are because where you are belongs to now, to this very moment and only this moment is real!

There is a great deal of fantasy in real life and real in fantasy.

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting

There was the dream of happiness and then there was what was real.