Depressive Realism Quotes

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. ~ Colin Feltham

Where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of obectivity....about 20 percent of all people live in that spot and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism. ...you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. ~ David McRaney

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 make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. ~ Ian McEwan

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. ~ Ella Leya

I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.
- Martin Luther King Jr. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Get your life. Because while you are neglecting yourself for whatever cause, that is exactly what everyone else is doing -- children, spouse, co-workers, etc. ~ Holland Meissner

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'. ~ Yukio Mishima

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas. ~ Robert Longo

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind. ~ David Mitchell

Today, Democrats not only have the White House; they have the Senate too. So we have to be realistic about what we can and cannot achieve, while at the same recognizing that realism should never be confused with capitulation. ~ Mitch McConnell

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. ~ Christopher Dawson

Manic depressive people often have incredible energy and a slightly skewed, but nonetheless valid, way of looking at things. ~ Kathryn Lasky

A lot of the time, when we think about the past, there's a slightly smug patronizing attitude that kicks in. We know so much more than our ancestors did. We make it a joke: can you believe that in Tang dynasty China they thought that ghosts of soldiers, if they weren't buried, would live in some limbo forever, floating above the battlefield in their unburied bodies?

There's always the risk, or the reality, of that slight pulling back, for the modern reader, from connecting with or understanding the past. We always have this space between the foolishness, from our point of view, of what they thought of the world, and the correctness of our understanding of it.

What the fantastic lets me do, along with the other things that we've discussed, is make the world be as my characters believe it to be. When I do that, when I make the reader understand it, the reader is there, the ghosts are there above that battlefield. They're actually there. You read a book that takes that matter-of-factly. That's one of the definitions of magic realism, by the way: the world is presented as the characters believe it to be, without any sense that the worldview is quaint.

The strength of this, for me, is enormous, because it removes that smugness from the reader who's willing to go there, to be immersed in it. You accept the way the world is, the way the characters do, because that's what you've got. That's one of the things the fantastic gives me.

Or, I'll ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women's heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can't just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp's face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don't have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I've made it quite clear that I don't want to be a mom and I don't want to be stepmom either. ~ Jen Kirkman

There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn't talk. But if I hadn't gotten drunk that night, if I hadn't gotten in that accident, would I have ever had this moment? Lying there in the sun, holding Sam's hand like time didn't exist and the real world couldn't touch us?
Somehow I didn't think so. ~ Keary Taylor

Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted - and few have been able to resist the power for long - to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

I turned around and headed back to the stairwell, planning to go downstairs and buy a chocolate bar from the vending machine. Maybe it would fall on me and end my misery. ~ Kenneth Oppel

The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Hyperrealism is more about objectifying ... how an object can be portrayed when it is seen through a camera's lens ... all my paintings are about an object being viewed through human eyes. ~ Liu Dan

Don't be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in. ~ L.M. Montgomery

And when Tolstoy found God his lines went limp, and Turgenev on his deathbed grieved for him because although Tolstoy had given up his land and his coppers for God, he had also given up something else. And although Dostoevski ended up on believing in Christ, he took the long road to get there, a most interesting and perhaps unwholesome road over roulette tables, raping a small child, standing before a wall waiting for the rifles to fire, he found that "adversity is the main-spring of self-realism," he found his Christ, but what a most interesting Christ, a self-made Christ, and I bow to him. ~ Charles Bukowski

Abstraction and realism work best together. ~ Ken Danby

This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all. ~ George W. Bush

For anyone with a library in their head and love in their heart, ~ Kevin Ansbro

There are two ways of confronting the country's problems.One is through a management style based on adventurism, instability, play-acting, exaggerations, wrongdoing, being secretive, self-importance, superficiality and ignoring the law. The second way is based on realism, respect, openness, collective wisdom and avoiding extremism. ~ Mir-Hossein Mousavi

It's a manic-depressive life. You run in here, you open your incubator, your experiment makes no sense, you think, 'I hate this job.' Then ten minutes later you think, 'Well, now, maybe I'll try this or I'll try that.' You do it because you know there will be an 'a-ha!' day. ~ Bonnie Bassler

The form of the Gothic novel also implicitly contested the claims of Realism to reflect the world directly by showing how artificial its structure was. ~ Michael Richardson

That's a way to increase the realism to the reader, if you want to get technical - you leave it [character] vague and you let the reader fill in the blanks with their imagination. ~ Nicholas Sparks

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on. ~ Pablo Picasso

The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out. ~ Gore Vidal

To be free means always leaving ... or returning to a place where leaves never fall. ~ Rich Shapero

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Representational painters: place your works in a larger context. Give your work not only breadth but breath. Do not 'copy' what you see outwardly but give it 'spirit. ~ Joshua L. Goldberg

My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker. ~ Rick Moody

What happened? Stan repeats.
To us?
To the country?
What happened when childhood ends in Dealey Plaza, in Memphis, in the kitchen of the Ambassador, your belief your hope your trust lying in a pool of blood again? Fifty-five thousand of your brothers dead in Vietnam, a million Vietnamese, photos of naked napalmed children running down a dirt road, Kent State, Soviet tanks roll into Prague so you turn on drop out you know you can't reinvent the country but maybe you reimagine yourself you believe you really believe that you can that you can create a world of your own and then you lower that expectation to just a piece of ground to make a stand on but then you learn that piece of ground costs money that you don't have.
What happened?
Altamont, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Son of Sam, Mark Chapman we saw a dream turn into a nightmare we saw love and peace turn into endless war and violence our idealism into realism our realism into cynicism our cynicism into apathy our apathy into selfishness our selfishness into greed and then greed was good and we
Had babies, Ben, we had you and we had hopes but we also had fears we created nests that became bunkers we made our houses baby-safe and we bought car seats and organic apple juice and hired multilingual nannies and paid tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear.
What happened?
You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a b ~ Don Winslow

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror. ~ Oscar Wilde

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence. ~ Vasily Rozanov

On top of the good was a hideously ugly bronze statue in the modern style. The statue was of a couple, dressed in togas, wrapped in an embrace. Cupped in their hands was a piece of fruit. I couldn't be sure, because realism did not appear to be the artist's specialty, but it looked to me like a pomegranate.
"Good God," Frank, who'd trailed after us, said when he saw the statue. "Rector's even sicker than any of us thought. I've never wished I was blind before, like Graves, but I do now, because then I'd never have to look at that again."
"Frank," John said, his gaze on my face. "Be quiet."
"But what do they do in here?" Frank wanted to know. "Have picnics with their dead relatives and admire their ugly art? ~ Meg Cabot

He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny. ~ Howard Thurman

The part of the Lake District that Beatrix Potter chose as her own was not only physically beautiful, it was a place in which she felt emotionally rooted as a descendant of hard-working north-country folk. The predictable routines of farm life appealed to her. There was a realism in the countryside that nurtured a deep connection. The scale of the villages was manageable. Yet the vast desolateness of the surrounding fells was awe-inspiring. It was mysterious, but easily imbued with fantasy and tamed by imagination. The sheltered lakes and fertile valleys satisfied her love of the pastoral. The hill farms and the sheep on the high fells demanded accountability. There was a longing in Beatrix Potter for association with permanence: to find a place where time moved slowly, where places remained much as she remembered them from season to season and from year to year. ~ Linda Lear

I don't think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom. ~ Nick Hornby

Realism: A post dadaist yearning for the ontological validation of domestic miseries and bygone centuries. ~ Carol Novack

...political realism is the way forward for any system that is genuinely for humanity or for the interest and advancement of the people of this world. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

If energy is delight and exuberance is beauty, the manic depressive knows more about life than anyone else. Didn't Freud say happiness was nothing more than the remission of pain? So, the more pain, the intenser the happiness. ~ Saul Bellow