Realist Fiction Quotes

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there. ~ Daniel Woodrell

Among the people to whom he belonged, nothing was written or talked about at that time except the Serbian war. Everything that the idle crowd usually does to kill time, it now did for the benefit of the Slavs: balls, concerts, dinners, speeches, ladies' dresses, beer, restaurants - all bore witness to our sympathy with the Slavs.

With much that was spoken and written on the subject Konyshev did not agree in detail. He saw that the Slav question had become one of those fashionable diversions which, ever succeeding one another, serve to occupy Society; he saw that too many people took up the question from interested motives. He admitted that the papers published much that was unnecessary and exaggerated with the sole aim of drawing attention to themselves, each outcrying the other. He saw that amid this general elation in Society those who were unsuccessful or discontented leapt to the front and shouted louder than anyone else: Commanders-in-Chief without armies, Ministers without portfolios, journalists without papers, and party leaders without followers. He saw that there was much that was frivolous and ridiculous; but he also saw and admitted the unquestionable and ever-growing enthusiasm which was uniting all classes of society, and with which one could not help sympathizing. The massacre of our coreligionists and brother Slavs evoked sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against their oppressors. And the heroism of the Serbs and Montenegrins, fighting for a ~ Leo Tolstoy

Annie's message is timeless, her shining spirit and healing gift from the Spiritual Universe will capture your heart. She was born with birth defects in a time when special children and their mothers were put to death or banished. But have things changed really that much? Have they changed enough? "No!" Bullying, abuse, ridicule, and inequality thrives in the lives of women and children in our global modern society, just as surely as it did in the mid-1600s Colonial America. Based on factual research. ~ Deborah A.Bowman

Like any good optimist, I don't expect the worst to happen. Only, like any optimist worth his salt, I like to go and look as soon as possible afterward jest in case it did. ~ William Faulkner

Imagination is highly suspect. Reality is what is beautiful. But we are blind to it because it is familiar. ~ Mal Peet

As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I'll pen our love story, if you'll be my co-author. ~ Jarod Kintz

May they run free forever and grow back their limbs! ~ Henry Mosquera

It was killing him, seeing her this way. She was not meant to be uncertain, timid or fearful; the woman he knew exuded confidence so fiercely it might as well be a damn spiritual aura. He needed to fix this.

"It's time to adjust your perspective. You want to show the politicians on Earth they don't rule the galaxy? Well, let's show them. ~ G.S. Jennsen

For what was burned at the stakes beyond the fires did endure ~ T. M. Lakomy

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word. ~ Charles Stross

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. ~ Paul Auster

There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. ~ Ray Bradbury

This virtual world is sparsely populated but you may find some of my soldiers that were able to get in to the world who may prove to be a big help in your quest. That is if they haven't been captured by the gloobas or turn into traitors themselves. - Elder God "The Thousand Years War ~ Angel Ramon Medina

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was. ~ David Foster Wallace

If you don't feel you have any choice in a situation, self-esteem and confidence plummet. But once you understand that you do have a choice, self-esteem will improve. You aren't a helpless victim anymore. You decide how you deal with a situation. You aren't just reacting to life; you're creating your life. ~ Theresa Cheung

Something stirred within him that was new, dangerous. The question of whether that was wise. 'Sure. ~ Jessica O'Toole

Reality for me is what I create! ~ Manjiri Prabhu

If you're going to do something, DO IT.
If you want something, GET IT.
Don't just wish for it!
--- Mary Lynn H. Plaisance ~ Mary Lynn Plaisance

Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside. ~ Terry Pratchett

I have no inner life. I have no 'intimate' life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.
(…)
Others' shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They're gone ~ Joyce Carol Oates

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

the influence of organised crime reaches into the economy, our politics and everyday life- dongri to dubai ~ S. Hussain Zaidi

A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic. ~ Robert J. Sawyer

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want. ~ C.E. Morgan

I'm naming my son just what he is. I'm a whore and he is my son. If he grows up ashamed of me, the hell with him. That's what I'm wantin' to name him, and that's what it's goin' to be. Whoreson! ~ Donald Goines

When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They're like turquoise gum drops. ~ Jo Treggiari

When Psyche got up to leave, Eros once again mentioned that he would miss her on Sunday."Even if you come on Sunday, I shall not be able to give you what you want. I shall be having my period then & it will be too messy for your liking," his secretary advised him.[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history. ~ E. M. Forster

Before I fix the world, I have to fix myself. ~ Evan Meekins

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think. ~ Walter Moers

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl's backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic? ~ Megan Abbott

Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex. ~ - Stephen King, The Atlantic (Interview)

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. ~ David Denby

How cinematic of an entrance that was. ~ Lauren Lola

...Newspapers, popular fiction, and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings.... ~ Lachman Gary Larkin Steve

The deer hovered by the trees beyond as the sounds of the ravening wolves came to them across the grass, their own senses almost frozen in impotent horror. ~ David Clement-Davies

We do not charge an author with unpardonable ignorance because his twelfth-century characters never stop arguing about The Smiths. It is possible that the writer, having only a feeble grasp of history, really does believe that The Smiths were around in the twelfth century, or that Morrissey is such a superlative genius as to be timeless. But the fact that this occurs in a work of fiction inclines us to the charitable view that the distortion is deliberate. This is highly convenient for poets and novelists. Literature, like an absolute monarch among his fawning courtiers, is where you can never be wrong. ~ Terry Eagleton

The work reveals the creator - and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer. ~ Katherine Paterson