Real World Quotes

I don't think college is for everyone. School is awesome, but for me, I was learning a lot more outside the classroom in the real world than I was in school. ~ Blake Mycoskie

The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech. ~ Kathleen Troia McFarland

The dream appears to be real. It does really seem we are here in this world; but this is not so. ~ Frederick Lenz

Old-school viewers remain adamant that 'The Real World' has deteriorated, as if the original enterprise were some pristine experiment that got sullied as the conditions in the lab got sloppier. ~ Andrea Seigel

The real world of American society is one which it is very misleading to call simply a democracy. Of course, it is in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which there are enormous inequities in the distribution of power and force. For example, the entire commercial and industrial system is in principle excluded from the democratic process, including everything that goes on within it ~ Noam Chomsky

One way to figure out a great theory is to look at what's working in the real world and figure out what the various successes have in common. With ~ Seth Godin

I still like to live in a whimsical world that seems more romantic and fantasy-related because real life seems so hard ~ Taylor Swift

It was one of those perfect Autumn days so common in stories and rare in the real world. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Particularly with MFA students, who have so much invested - literally and figuratively - I feel like honest criticism is something they're owed. It's not going to be easier in the real world, surely. ~ Tod Goldberg

I want each of you to go through life making the most of your individuality. Like it or not, you will go out into the real world and be treated as an adult. Adults show each other no mercy. If you fail to cultivate within yourself a fight-back mentality, society will end up controlling you. ~ Tadao Ando

I hated Pinocchio. I think I was the only one in the class who hated him. Pinocchio was alive, but that was not enough for him. He could walk and talk and touch things in the real world, but he spent the whole book wanting more.
Pinocchio didn't know how lucky he was. ~ Matthew Green

A film must have two elements - it must deal with the real world and show how it could be made better. ~ Rouben Mamoulian

There is no room in the economic literature for people making a living through self-employment, finding way to develop goods or services that they sell directly to those who need them. But in the real world, that's what you see the poor doing everywhere. ~ Muhammad Yunus

People who have already been out in the real world, practicing for years whatever their particular specialty might be, have some basis for determining which things are relevant enough to go into a curriculum to teach those who follow. The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s. ~ Thomas Sowell

Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out. Betrayers came from everywhere, including inside his own body, his own mind. He could trust no one, not even himself. ~ Steven Erikson

The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is.
They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. ~ Jean Baudrillard

It is easy to criticize, particularly in a political season. But to lead is something altogether different. The leader must live in the real world of the price that might be paid for the goal that has been set. ~ Norm Coleman

It felt as if I had lived all my life inside a flat painting and only now had I stepped into the real world. ~ Rosamund Hodge

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do. ~ Sherman Alexie

You stupid, conceited fool! You know nothing! You're like a child, blind to everything but its own empty stomach! Well, grow up, Carl, and join the real world. Until you do, for God's sake leave me be! ~ Amanda Browning

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare ... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism. ~ Arnaud Desplechin

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World ... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Being offended is part of being in the real world. ~ Courtney Love

It seemed as if the colours of the real world around me had begun to drain away from my having done nothing more than read a few lines she had written. ~ Haruki Murakami

And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters … you at least give them a shot at it, because … just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist. ~ Anne Lamott

Experience has shown repeatedly that a mathematical theory with a rich internal structure generally turns out to have significant implications for the understanding of the real world, often in ways no one could have envisioned before the theory was developed. ~ William Thurston

And you are a useless princess who knows absolutely nothing of the real world. You would be the very last person I'd choose to chain myself to. But apparently both our kingdoms - no. The whole realm needs this alliance, so what we want doesn't matter. I will do what I have to do, regardless of my personal feelings, and you will do the same. So sit down, grow up, and start acting like the kind of princess your people deserve." He snapped off the last syllable and abruptly let go at the same time so that I stumbled backward. ~ Betsy Schow

The real world lady, it's out there. Do you even know that? You're going to have to get back to it sometime. ~ Mona Awad

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When the word art gives you a sinking feeling, what's left for you in the real world? ~ Will Chancellor

Meditation transports one from the transient world of matter to the real world of dreamings, visions, and imaginings where idea is and concepts are born. ~ Walter Russell

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this "knowledge" forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The "tree" of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil "are in a combined state," where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the "tree" is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition "to eat" means "to assimilate." To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative "combines" good and evil. Adam's transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly "that of autonomy," accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be "the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law. ~ Alain De Benoist

You have to be a responsible adult and support yourself because no one else is going to do it for you. ~ Susane Colasanti

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I start to say no, then stop myself. I have to try. I have to try, because I'm doing it again-I'm shutting everything out because I'm frustrated and tired and because the real world is difficult and I'd rather live in one of my own making. But I can't. I am here, and I have to try. ~ Francesca Zappia

I'm not a dream crusher. The real world already does enough of that without me getting into the business ~ Tim Tharp

... out here in the real world, my man, you would be amazed how seldom murder has to break into people's lives. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in. ~ Tana French

If Scientologists are happy in the church, I say God bless. Honestly, it's probably better for them to keep getting jerked off in the church, because they will never experience that kind of validation in the real world. ~ Leah Remini

Doesn't the world inside a black and white photograph seem more real? It's because the real world is losing its color ~ Tablo

Humankind doesn't have a genuine intellectual memory. They don't need the Truth. They don't want to know the Truth. ~ Robert Neil Fleischer

But it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close. ~ Ann Brashares

Real intellectuals like to escape once in a while from their world of intellect. ~ Desi Arnaz

PRINCIPLE is likewise such a law for action, except that it has not the formal definite meaning, but is only the spirit and sense of law in order to leave the judgment more freedom of application when the diversity of the real world cannot be laid hold of under the definite form of a law. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. ~ Mark Bowden

Chess reflects the real world in miniature. Endeavor, struggle, success, and defeat - they are part of each game ever played. ~ Bruce Pandolfini

The thing is - any author on the internet doesn't weigh nearly enough as an author in the real world. ~ Joel Landau

QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting. ~ Alexandra Robbins

Welcome to the real world of marriage, where hairs are always on the sink and little white spots cover the mirror, where arguments center on which way the toilet paper comes off and whether the lid should be up or down. It is a world where shoes do not walk to the closet and drawers do not close themselves, where coats do not like hangers and socks go AWOL during laundry. In this world, a look can hurt and a word can crush. Intimate lovers can become enemies, and marriage a battlefield. ~ Gary Chapman

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition. ~ Tana French

Conservative policies have on the whole worked - insofar as any set of policies can be said to 'work' in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of. ~ Bill Kristol

If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties ... and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks ... ~ James Alan Gardner

I tried out for another show while I was in college so I could pay off my student loans, and it sort of led to The Real World. The same people that were casting that show were casting The Real World, so they asked me to do it. ~ Trishelle Cannatella

[A] proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately -
usurped. ~ Richard Dawkins

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens. ~ Roger Ebert

[To James Laughlin] It was pleasant to learn that you expected our correspondence to be read in the international salons and boudoirs of the future. Do you think they will be able to distinguish between the obfuscations, mystification, efforts at humor, and plain statement of fact? Will they recognize my primary feelings as a correspondent - the catacomb from which I write to you, seeking to secure some word from the real world, or at least news of the Far West - and sigh with compassion? Or will they just think I am nasty, an over-eager clown, gauche, awkward and bookish? Will they understand that I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naïveté until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am poked to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway? And for that matter, what will they make of your complex character? ~ Delmore Schwartz

When a story is flying along, and I'm so into it that my 'real' world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a 'flow state,' and it's better than publication, money, awards, fame. ~ Nancy Kress

I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it? ~ Richard Hugo

Outside of these doors, it is the real world. Someone tries to get you to do something wrong, run. ~ Ray Lewis

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world. ~ Elizabeth Moon

Business is essentially applied rationality:
a systematic process of thinking that produces a real-world result. Instead of mortgaging your life to go to business school, it's possible to dramatically increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost - without setting foot inside a classroom. ~ Josh Kaufman

Money values do not simply mirror the state of affairs in the real world; valuation is a positive act that makes an impact on the course of events. Monetary and real phenomena are connected in a reflexive fashion; that is, they influence each other mutually. The reflexive relationship manifests itself most clearly in the use and abuse of credit. ~ George Soros

One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there ~ Noam Chomsky

< Dear Luke,
I'm sorry for coming by unannounced. You haven't been returning my texts, and a stronger man would have gotten the hint - >
Movement caught my eye. I looked at him. He was signing. Slowly. Imperfectly. Little inflections were wrong, and he got some of the ideas out of order, but he was, as best he could, reciting the letter to me.
- gotten the hint, but I'm not strong. I'm not proud. I'm in love with you, and I'm sorry for hurting you. Please let me say my piece, and then I'll leave if you want. But I'd never be able to look in a mirror if the last time we spoke was that night on the phone.
You are nothing but love and warmth and strength, and the world was a better place when you were a nurse in it. I don't know how serious things are, but if you can get back into nursing, that's what I want for you. If there's a way I can help - any way at all, big or small - please tell me. You deserve your dreams, and I was a complete ass for the things I said during our fight.
I'll never do that again. Never. If you let me in your life, I promise to listen. To always listen. To listen carefully and compassionately. I'll give you advice when you want it or help if you need it, but I will always listen.
And if you want me, a reclaimed ass who promises to do better, in your life, it would make me happy. I don't know what we'd look like in the real world, but I can't think of another person I'd rather figure things out with.
We've ~ Peter Styles

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries. ~ John Banville

The sad thing is that, for many writers of fantasy fiction, the inclusion of magic seems to mean that logical ramifications and real-world laws both go out the window. ~ Jane Lindskold

What happens if you lose?" Jeremy pressed.
"I don't see it as winning or losing. I'm just looking for a middle ground," he [Justin] said. "I get that technology is convenient and has its benefits. We definitely can't live without it. We can't go back to living in caves. But most people are so plugged in, they're not even living in the real world. Our lives aren't grounded by anything. Being too dependent on something makes you a slave to it. And I sure as hell won't worship a digital screen. So I'm looking for a halfway point. A balance. It's not just about ending digital school. It's about having a choice. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

In a perfect world, we would all swap our carb loaded breakfasts for veggie smoothies, exercise 7 days a week, and meditate for an hour a day. No one would be overweight, we would never lose our tempers and we would sing Kumbaya all day. This is the real world, so this is never going to happen. As ~ Carmella J Bell

The same people who never did their homework in high school are still doing that to this very day out in the real world. ~ Jules Shear

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness. ~ Haruki Murakami

I may be only a fish and chip shop lady, but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping. ~ Pauline Hanson

However, the natural symbol, without our being sufficiently conscious of the fact, is identical with the reality of the world that appears to us, for every object in the natural world is at the same time a symbolic reality to us. The psyche certainly does not use an "object" of nature as a "symbol," but rather the experience of an "object" itself is always already symbolic experience. The star or tree in us is no less real and no less symbolic than it is in outward experience. For each possibility of experience either presupposes a spiritually forming, that is to say a symbolic activity, or is identical with this. That is, everything spiritual appears to us first not just in nature but as nature; or we could formulate this just as well the other way around: everything natural, whether outward or inward, appears to us as an image, that is to say as formed spirit. We are surrounded by images, inwardly and outwardly, but at the same time formed and determined in all our experiences by the natural symbol as though by a unitary natural-spiritual reality, for our psychic system only grasps that which appears to us as the real world through the world of natural symbolism. ~ Erich Neumann

A lot of nudity in my early movies was out of necessity. When I came out to Hollywood, I didn't know anybody, I didn't have any connections. I did what a lot of people have to do in the real world, and just work up from the bottom. ~ Amber Heard

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world. ~ Elizabeth Moon

A person with less knowledge and more self-confidence (which is primarily a way of thinking and acting) will often run circles around a person with more knowledge and less self-confidence; which means that self-confidence has the upper hand to knowledge when it comes to acting in the world. It has been interesting to see many of my star academic students struggle with teaching in the real world, while others who were less qualified in the academic field but had more self-confidence have gone out and positively affected many more people through their teaching. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

When I was out in the real world, functioning in everyday society, and someone would say "Time is just a construct," I would roll my eyes and continue to check errands off my To Do list. But I was wrong, and they were right. Time means nothing. Never is that more clear than in a hospital bed. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Haunting was the feeling you got sometimes, in the Vurt, the real world calling you home. There's more to life than this. This is just a game. ~ Jeff Noon

Inspiration is really all around us. I pay attention to a lot of different fields. I stay up on current events. I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. Paying attention to social interactions offline really inform interactions online. The real world is a bottomless source of inspiration for what you can build. ~ Caterina Fake

[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality]

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR] ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I am very happy to be alive. There is much fun to be had. Music, movies, books, paintings, drawingsI hope you have these things where you are. If you have them, what does the real world matter anyway? ~ John Frusciante

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all
a backdrop for the stories we must tell. ~ Kate Atkinson

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. ~ Michael Crichton

The fact is that if the Christian home, church, and school have done their job well and the student has learned well, he may be one of the few on the earth who understand the real world. ~ Jim Berg

When evaluating a model, at least two broad standards are relevant. One is whether the model is consistent with the data. The other is whether the model is consistent with the 'real world.' ~ Kenneth A. Bollen

I think, I think we need a Republican president from the real world to remind ourselves sometimes of what we need to do. ~ Lamar Alexander

I'm not a fan of simulations. Where, 'Oh, we'll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace' and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that's not the kind of games that I make. ~ Jane McGonigal

Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma. Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic. To realize his vision, he compromised and improvised. The willingness to do what he needed to do in a given moment makes him an elusive historical figure. Yet in the real world ... his creative flexibility made him a transformative leader. ~ Jon Mecham

In the real world, you must go along. You must cooperate and compromise. You cannot bend the world to your morals."
"Would you have noticed me had I not tried to? ~ Pierce Brown

Rashid did not give in. "Look how his hands move on the contols," he told her. "In those worlds left-handedness does not impede him. Amazingly, he is almost ambidextrous." Soraya snorted with annoyance. "Have you seen his handwriting?" she said. "Will his hedgehogs and plumbers help with that? Will his 'pisps' and 'wees' get him through school? Such names! They sound like going to the bathroom or what." Rashid began to smile placatingly. "The term is consoles," he began but Soraya turned on her heel and walked away, waving one hand high above her head. "Do not speak to me of such things," she said over her shoulder, speaking in her grandest voice. "I am in-console-able. ~ Salman Rushdie

Nothing makes me happier than working with real people in the real world. ~ Tim Gunn

The mystery of this courage of Bauer's is Hegel's Phenomenology. As Hegel here puts self-consciousness in the place of man, the most varied human reality appears only as a definite form, as a determination of self-consciousness. But a mere determination of self-consciousness is a "pure category," a mere "thought" which I can consequently also abolish in "pure" thought and overcome through pure thought. In Hegel's Phenomenology the material, perceptible, objective bases of the various estranged forms of human self-consciousness are left as they are. Thus the whole destructive work results in the most conservative philosophy because it thinks it has overcome the objective world, the sensuously real world, by merely transforming it into a "thing of thought" a mere determination of self-consciousness and can therefore dissolve its opponent, which has become ethereal, in the "ether of pure thought." Phenomenology is therefore quite logical when in the end it replaces human reality by "Absolute Knowledge" - Knowledge, because this is the only mode of existence of self-consciousness, because self-consciousness is considered as the only mode of existence of man; absolute knowledge for the very reason that self-consciousness knows itself alone and is no more disturbed by any objective world. Hegel makes man the man of self-consciousness instead of making self-consciousness the self-consciousness of man, of real man, man living in a real objective world and determined by that world. He ~ Karl Marx

I needed for the imaginary version of my world to be darker than my real world. Otherwise, I would have wanted to leave them both. ~ Colleen Hoover

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not ... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre. ~ Richard Foreman

The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city. ~ Tahir Shah

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you'll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we're bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we're good. And real-world policy - policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families - is being built on that foundation. ~ Paul Krugman

There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before. ~ Margo Lanagan

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I'd meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there's another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I'd be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place. ~ Edwin Muir

There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought - in an inscape - every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. She ~ Joe Hill

What is especially ironic about these professors' rhetoric of "otherness" and "queerness" is that they are, in fact, by any real-world measure, extremely conservative, lockstep, institutional, careerist creatures. Their sense of identification with their universities, their departments, and their fields of "study", not to mention the obvious way they size one another up by their titles, academic affiliation, and publications, is stifling. So are their endless pious references to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, which bring to mind the obligatory nods to the Great Leader at some Communist Party congress. ~ Bruce Bawer

I think that I'm just the same, but there is sometimes that you just have to be real. You have to look in the mirror and be real with yourself and you have go: 'You know what? I am the best in the world. What is happening?' ~ Mickie James