My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie’s Choice. A daring tour de force.
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
The backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
I’m only waiting for Lindsay Lohan’s fashion collection to come out. Ten years from now, there may be no real designers left.
Don’t try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.
No matter how long you train someone to be brave, you never know if they are or not until something real happens.
She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplace disgust for another person’s genetics.
It’s not often real that you encounter the real person behind a good-natured mask, the darkest part of someone. It’s not comfortable what you do.
But there’s so much that was a lie, it’s hard to figure out what was true, what was real, what matters.
How is it I know this little about the boy who says he loves me – the boy whose real name is powerful enough to keep us alive in a train car full of enemies?
Cowardice is how you decide to be in real life.
The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Nothing is more true, more real, than the primeval magnetic disturbances that two souls may communicate to one another, through the tiny sparks of a moment’s glance.
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.
As we have explained, in first love the soul is taken long before the body; later the body is taken long before the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all.