The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.
And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.
Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
I hardly ever read mainstream fiction that deals with life as it is. I like an element of fantasy, something that isn’t quite of the real world.
Life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they’re precious.
We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.
I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do – make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you’ve never been. It’s the most amiable sort of magic I know.
Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real.
Adults are the real monsters.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.
I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.
The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.
I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.
No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.
Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person.
Wait with patience and love and strength. If helpers are not ready now, they will come in time. Why should we be in a hurry? The real working force of all great work is in its almost unperceived beginnings.
While real perfection is only one, relative perfections must be many.
All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.