Real Things Quotes

This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world ~ Don DeLillo

Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren't. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren't applying themselves. ~ Woody Allen

My favorite kinds of stories are the ones that have these big crazy genre hijinks and then a real honest, meaty, emotional story where we're watching a character grapple with some real things. ~ Greg Pak

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

That's what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."
"You don't even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do. ~ John Green

The harder I try to realistically portray real things, the more the things that appear in my work have a tendency to become unreal. ~ Haruki Murakami

I still feel lucky whenever I hear a director say, "Action!" Because then I think, "Whoa, I'm really in the movies. This is a real thing happening." I've never not been enthralled by that. I still love it. I still love hearing it, and I feel really lucky all the time. ~ Fred Armisen

And real things break.
Imaginary things last forever. ~ Jessica Brody

Because..." he used to cradle his daughter in his arms every morning and often they would exchange soft nuances "...if you can dream it, if you can see it in your visions at night, if you can feel it in your soul, it's yours! And it never really belonged to anyone else, in the first place! It was always yours!" Viera returned her scroll to the drawer and closed it, she kissed the compass around her neck and climbed into her bed under the warm quilts, the candle flame crackled and the memories of her father's arms around her embraced her there in bed and his deep, hoarse voice resounded in her ears; "... and if you chance upon a treasure that is yours and it happens to be in the possession of someone else, it's not very wrong to take what is yours, to take what you dreamed, what you saw in your visions at night, what you felt visit you in your spirit! Sure, it's not lawful, but aye aye my little one, listen to me when I tell you that the best things in life are not under the laws of any sort! For which law created love? Which law created courage? The best things, the real things, are the things that are not measured by any man's laws! Fear is the only thing that any law has ever created! And what kind of pirates would we all be if we were afraid of any of our fears, even a little! ~ C. JoyBell C.

I want real things ... music that makes holes in the sky. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

I think right about now we have to beware of marketed Malcolms and Martins. Real people do real things. ~ Chuck D

Subtle, funny and touching, with a striking downbeat authenticity. Director Craig Zobel is the real thing. ~ A.O. Scott

The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies. ~ Frank Pittman

Havin loved enough and lost enough,
I'm no longer searching,
just opening,
no longer trying to make sense of pain
but trying to be a soft and sturdy home
in which real things can land.
These are the irritations
that rub into a pearl.
So we can talk for a while
but then we must listen,
the way rocks listen to the sea.
And we can churn at all that goes wrong
but then we must lay all distractions
down and water every living seed.
And yes, on nights like tonight
I too feel along. But seldom do I
face it squarely enough
to see that it's a door
into the endless berath
that has no breather,
into the surf that human
shell calls God. ~ Mark Nepo

The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are. ~ Douglas Adams

I'm so glad you're here, Anne,' said Miss Lavendar, nibbling at her candy. 'If you weren't I should be blue ... very blue ... almost navy blue. Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy. One wants real things then. But you don't know this ... seventeen never knows it. At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on. ~ L.M. Montgomery

If that moment had been a real thing, it would've been a butterfly, flapping and fluttering toward the sun. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I write songs about real things ... The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really. ~ John Mayall

Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

I think my audience is smart. If there's a way to be entertained and get things out - real things, not stupid moral crap - that's the best. ~ Michael Pitt

I'm no model lady. A model's just an imitation of the real thing. ~ Mae West

You think because you name it and tell it, it becomes? A story is a present, tied with a ribbon and a wish. Real things aren't so easy. ~ Julia Fine

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I went to art school, but I didn't last because in those days you couldn't take comics as a course. And they weren't even teaching you to draw real things, they were really into abstracts, and I was not into abstracts, so art school and I did not work out. ~ Trina Robbins

Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before ... and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world. ~ J.K. Rowling

Yes, the party had been delightful, but there was more to the world than that. Bigger things, more beautiful things, more real things. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Sean at sixteen thought 'Rexecutioner's Dream' was the greatest thing he'd ever heard, something so strange and different it seemed like a message from another realm. It had cover art, but the art was glued onto the inner sleeve of a standard-issue black cassette; the spine was hand lettered. It was the product of someone's hard work, a vision brought into the world of real things. A dream disguised in a crude, plain package. ~ John Darnielle

It could have been like a fairy tale. But fairy tales aren't real. Things don't work like that. There's a price for everything. ~ Maureen Johnson

I truly believe that we each have a House of Belonging waiting for us. Waiting to be found, waiting to be built, waiting to be renovated, waiting to be cleaned up. Waiting to rescue us. Waiting for the real thing: a grown-up, romantic, reciprocal relationship. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe. ~ Gary Zukav

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I don't want to write about real things, I would rather write about an uncontrollable parasitic twin. ~ Mary Sage Nguyen

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now. ~ Jane Langton

The real things about man are not his body ... ~ T. B. Joshua

Sometimes I feel as though the real things are passing me by. As though I've been pushed to the margins of life. ~ Margaret Leroy

The real thing is the heart, you know the heart shouldn't be covered with concrete. ~ Chuck D

Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside. ~ Jimmy Connors

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. ~ May Sarton

The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to die for rags
that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. ~ Mark Twain

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing. ~ Sydney Pollack

A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows. ~ George Bernard Shaw

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli. ~ Jonathan Franzen

In a career playing heroes, I learned a little about the real thing. A hero stands up-for himself, for herself, but most importantly for others. ~ Kevin Sorbo

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real. ~ Robert Bresson

Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize when it's too late. ~ Peter Heller

We have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing. ~ Muriel Spark

Your political reputation affects how likely allies are to trust you, and what kind of deals they'll offer at the negotiating table. There's also some emotional response in there, so factions do bear grudges. Just like the real thing. ~ Mike Simpson

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we're all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn't all totally pointless. ~ Irvine Welsh

Falling in love is like eating mushrooms, you never know if it's the real thing until it's too late. ~ Bill Ballance

The one real thing that money buys - Time. ~ Marita Bonner

After all, real things are not simple. ~ C.S. Lewis

It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions. ~ Ann Brashares

In the end countries, like people, are alone, and the real things that must be done have to be done without help. ~ Nayantara Sahgal

The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

When we say, "I take refuge in the Buddha," we should also understand that "The Buddha takes refuge in me," because without the second part the first part is not complete. The Buddha needs us for awakening, understanding, and love to be real things and not just concepts. They must be real things that have real effects on life. Whenever I say, "I take refuge in the Buddha," I hear "the Buddha takes refuge in me." ~ Nhat Hanh

Every idea from your thoughts is the real thing it's strength ~ Rhonda Byrne

My biggest Buff Orpinton rooster is on the small corral fence letting the world know he is in charge, all puffed up and sassy. There is nothing more silly than a rooster taking over the world, but every day he things he can. I wonder if we are just a little part of the world, like that rooster, and that the real things go on around us while we strut in our own yards trying to take charge of things. ~ Nancy E. Turner

There is an invariable law that the only way to keep the real things of life is by sharing them or giving them away. ~ Alice Hegan Rice

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven. ~ Bill Ayers

A church without symbols, a church without baptism or communion where only the real things mattered and where the atonement must be as real as the sin itself, where for instance if you broke a playmate's toy in anger you must go home immediately and fetch a toy of your own, of as good or better quality, and give it to that playmate for keeps and then announce your error at Public Amending on Sunday. ~ Anne Tyler

You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain. ~ Emilie Autumn

If you're going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you're going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn't buy fresh pasta. ~ Mario Batali

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer. ~ Mindy Kaling

Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been, to discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age. Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.
No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds. ~ Tad Williams

It is a question of our minds. What culture deals with is not that we have to learn to see all the Italian painting, all the Spanish painting, this is pilling up information about culture. But what culture means is that we are able to associate real things, nature, paintings we have seen, music we have heard, a book we have read, a film we saw, with our real life, our emotional life, which means a lot. ~ Agnes Varda

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. ~ Rainer Werner Fassbinder

And the real thing can kill you whether you believe in it or not. ~ R.A. Salvatore

We [Panthers] have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society. ~ Huey Newton

Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen. They ~ May Sarton

A thought-form held in thinking substance is a reality; it is a real thing, whether it has yet become visible to mortal eye or not. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

The feminine journey is a story unfolding, and its epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers
all of which we might miss without taking time and space in Deep Being. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.' ~ Sextus Empiricus

Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

My father taught me respect for quality as well as a sense of dignity - great values as we face a world going in a different direction. I try to teach my children to stay close to the real things. ~ Diego Della Valle

I don't like honors. I'm appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else ... I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors ... I can't stand it, it hurts me. ~ Richard P. Feynman

My attitude is if somebody blunders into the level of popularity; at least remember the human factor. These guys are still human beings and hopefully still have hearts and if you keep in touch with them rather than vilify them you may be able to encourage them to go in the right direction. What I'm hoping will eventually happen is that they will grasp the amount of power and financial clout that is now at their fingertips and use those as tools to help real people with real things the way punk politics was always designed to do before, but nobody had any money. ~ Jello Biafra

People are so afraid to talk about real things, but they're experiences that everyone goes through. ~ Halsey

Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before. ~ Philip Roth

You can access that on many levels and the human spirit and the human mind responds to those themes because they recognise the veracity of them. That they are real things. Sometimes it even goes beyond logic, it's just a sense of something. ~ Mel Gibson

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself. ~ Frida Kahlo

A successful argument for a government manufacturing policy has to go beyond the feeling that it's better to produce 'real things' than services. American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers. ~ Christina Romer

Personally, I've come to understand that I haven't been on a journey to give my house a coffee enema and make it whistle-clean from top to bottom. I take way too much joy in rediscovering all those things that I've been collecting since I was a kid, always searching for the things that felt "real"--things that felt genuine, had stories.

I shouldn't have to give up my love of going through old boxes and making discoveries of things I forgot existed or imagined must have been given away years ago, as if I've sent a care package to myself from some distant past I only half-remember. Suddenly, surprisingly, a box full of memories will bring it all back into sharp focus. ~ Eve O. Schaub

He loved telling stories. He had been everywhere in the world. The northwest frontier, the landscape of the Hindu Kush, was one of the great landscapes of my childhood because he used to evoke it with his stories. He taught me the sequence of ranks in the British army when I was about eight. I was in the bed with him while he told me everything about his life - except, probably, the real things, because of course you couldn't go there. ~ Sebastian Barry

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again. ~ Alice Walker

When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. ~ Nicole Krauss

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing. ~ Richard Prince

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him. ~ Lydia Davis

To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect. . . . Our external permanency would not be external, in our sense, if it was restricted in its influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of Reality. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

Ain't nothing like the real thing. ~ Marvin Gaye

I have traveled with Jessy Dixon for the past several years and never have I been with an artists with more heart. He is the real thing. ~ Bill Gaither

There is indeed a fundamental beauty in mathematical abstractions. They so attracted the Greek philosopher Plato that he declared that all those things that we can see and touch are, in fact, mere shadows of the true reality and that the real things of this universe can be found only through the use of pure reason. Plato's knowledge of mathematics was relatively naive, and many of the cherished purities of Greek mathematics have been shown to be flawed. ~ David Salsburg

And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: "Manual of internal culture for external barbarians." The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one, - to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the [Pg 34] considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there f ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I so much like real things - the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like - what shall I say? - the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

What I love about my daughter is that she is going to definitely allow me and force me to change my life and slow down and make it more about the real things in the world. ~ Rufus Wainwright

Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition. ~ Ellen Kushner

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing. ~ James Anthony Froude

If we make our own history, if we tell stories that bring us together, we'll be stronger. It'll give us something to believe in. The sickos can't do that – they're no better than animals – but we can. Every battle we win we have to tell the story over and over, so that we can win more battles. People love stories. They've told stories since even before they could write. Myths and legends, stories of heroes and villains, gods and monsters. Real things happened, the story got told and then the stories became legends. That's what we've got to do – tell our own heroic stories. ~ Charlie Higson

Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by and by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel - of course, in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys - see new places, cities and countries - live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations. ~ Nikola Tesla

Our dreams are made of real things, like a shoebox full of photographs. ~ Jack Johnson