Perspectival Realism Quotes

I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years. ~ Marvin Minsky

We could scan each car for terrorists

and lovers she could lean into

my camouflage her head resting on woven trees.

When they come for her body she could run deep
into my uniform

into the forest of me
where they could never find her. ~ Jalina Mhyana

Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces. Realism was the death of art. Great art should come from the harmony of two lines. ~ Arthur Wesley Dow

At this moment, as I stood on the verge of tears, the words "realism" and "romanticism" welled up within me. I have no sense of realism. And that this very fact might be what permits me to go on living sends cold chills through my whole body. ~ Osamu Dazai

I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another. ~ Mary E. Pearson

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing. ~ Jean-Pierre Melville

Blending hard-bitten realism with long-view optimism, Obama said that every 20 or 30 years brings a new cycle of pessimism in America. ~ Ron Fournier

The only realism in art is of the imagination. ~ William Carlos Williams

There are two types of men when it comes to approaching lone pretty women in bars. The shit type and the don't-have-the-balls-to-be-a-shit jealous type, and I was the latter and in situations like this the prey becomes the hunter and it's all just an under-stocked meat market trading in egos, tits and shame. ~ John Bowie

Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying quantum theory in terms of our pictures in the everyday world. The general conclusion is that in quantum theory naive realism, although necessary at the level of observations, fails at the microscopic level. ~ Ravi Gomatam

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

Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about. ~ Tori Amos

The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It's often imagined that it'll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint that the other strikes us as exceptionally attractive or accomplished. But surprisingly, it is deeply worrying to be obviously adored, because everyone, from the inside, knows very well that they don't deserve intense acclaim, are often disappointing and sometimes quite simply pitiful.
So seduction involves suggesting both that one likes the other person a lot – and yet can see their frailty quite clearly, that one cope with it and forgive it with gentle indulgence. One might, towards the end of the evening drop in a small warm tease that alludes to our understanding of some less than perfect side of them: 'I suppose you stayed under the duvet feeling a bit sorry for yourself after that?' we might ask, with a benign smile.
Such a gesture implies that we like another person not under a mistaken notion that they are flawless but with a full and unfrightened appreciation of their frailties. That ends up being powerfully seductive because it is, first and foremost, reassuring. It suggests the ideal way that we would like someone to view us within the testing conditions of a real relationship. We crave not admiration, but to be properly known and yet still liked and forgiven. ~ Alain De Botton

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature. ~ Ian Hacking

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? ~ Graham Swift

This is the magical realism of NAFTA - Mexico, the birthplace of corn, is now importing surplus corn from el Norte - millions of tons driving the price down so campesinos can't afford to grow it. Exporting people and importing corn. It is backwards, no? ~ John Vaillant

I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies. ~ Isabella Rossellini

The standards of judgement must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like. ~ Ouida

A lot of the stuff in 'Speed Racer' has never been done before, from it having a multi-tone, to it having a retro-cool family movie, to having the photo-realism with the CG-backgrounds and infinite focus the way they worked with these digital cameras, to even the color experimentation. ~ Emile Hirsch

Fantasy is a reaction to the constraints of reality. ~ Stewart Stafford

Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible. ~ Fanny Britt

Salvage what you can so you don't end up like me; bitter and hateful but disguising it with a smile, and then hide it away under the cover of wild nights and very early mornings. ~ J.C. Wickhart

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic. ~ Samuel Beckett

Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in order no longer to be disappointed. 4 "So I came to the city, my friend," the Doll then told Jodie, "what of it? ~ Richard Flanagan

Idealism and realism meet in the actual. ~ Mary Parker Follett

Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life
and truth, and morality, and art
far more clearly than our compromised elders. ~ Julian Barnes

For me, "Zoo" has always been a fable. It has nothing to do with realism. It's a fable about what man is doing to the world, and the animals have retribution. But in the real world, this would not happen. But in the world of 1984, this kind of thing can happen in a story. ~ James Patterson

One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. ~ Antoni Tapies

The philosophical point of view of the average man - if that term may be applied to his naive realism - has a claim to the highest consideration.
~ Alejandro Moreno

What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied ... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

Don't get me wrong, hard and soft fantasy stories can both be good. But you need to know which camp you're in. I'm into realism. I'm a hard fantasy guy. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?' ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around. ~ Terri Windling

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

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me. ~ Ben Lerner

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he wrote in Diplomacy, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable. ~ Walter Isaacson

It isn't a circle
it is simply a long line
as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end
we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes
who dream, who will not give up
are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

There is no realism without an element of idealism. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way? ~ Walter Brueggemann

There is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. ~ George Lakoff

There is an instinct for realism, a powerful drive to reproduce oneself. The fascination of photorealistic paintings lies partly in their apparent replication of life, but these are not merely replications. These paintings are often out of life scale, varying from over life-size to under life-size, from brilliant, heightened color to pale, undertone hues. ~ Audrey Flack

Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience. ~ Robert Genn