Realism Literature Quotes

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

One thing I hate about being ill is that no one believes it unless I share it all with them, and even then they don’t act on it.

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I know they don’t read that space-ship stuff. No, no, they read Literature—realism. Like The Help, or Fifty Shades of Grey.

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.

The fearful thing about the Chinese literary scene is that everyone keeps introducing new terms without defining them. And everyone interprets these terms as he pleases. To write a good deal about yourself is expressionism. To write largely about others is realism. To write poems on a girl's leg is romanticism. To ban poems on a girl's leg is classicism.

Writers are the engineers of the human souls

I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong.

Moral writing is boring.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason why I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting for the results.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

There’s something comforting, almost soothing, about realism, and it’s nothing to do with shocks of recognition — well it wouldn’t, since shocks never console — or even with the familiarity that breeds content, so as much as with the fact that the realistic world, in literature, at least, is one that, from a certain perspective, always makes sense, even in its bum deals and tragedies, inasmuch as it plays — even showboats and grandstands — to our passion for reason. The realistic tradition presumes to deal, I mean, with cause and effect, with some deep need in readers — in all of us — for justice, with the demand for the explicable reap/sow benefits (or punishments), with the law of just desserts — with all God’s and Nature’s organic bookkeeping. And since form fits and follows function, style is instructed not to make waves but merely to tag along, easy as pie, taking in everything that can be seen along the way but not much more and nothing at all of what isn’t immediately available to the naked eye.

I’ve read science fiction and fantasy all my life – though when you’re a child, they just call that “books.” The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren’t genre, they’re just Tuesday afternoon. I had no idea that I was writing fantasy at first, because I was so saturated in Greek literature that it never occurred to me that my talking animals and sentient mazes were anything but realism. Our instinct toward folklore and magical stories, parables and imagining the future, are as much a part of the human experiences as divorce, grief, falling in love, politics, or raising children. I’ve always read fantastic literature, because it’s always seemed truest to me. It makes the metaphorical literal and is all the more powerful for that immediacy and directness. I love genre fiction for the infinite expanse of stories it can tell – and it’s been my constant companion since I was a very small child.

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.

My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature.

Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The

Some folks struggled disproportionately, carrying things that others couldn't even lift.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

There’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism.

The saddest instance of the lack of real freedom, arising from the lack of real knowledge, is revealed to us in Leo Tolstoy's latest work, a work which at the same time, by virtue of its creative, poetic force, ranks almost first among all that has appeared in Russian literature since 1840. No! without culture, without freedom in the widest sense, freedom within oneself, freedom from preconceived ideas, freedom with regard to one's own nation and history, without this, the real artist is unthinkable; without this free air he cannot breathe.

Although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after Pushkin it was impossible for a Russian writer to depart too far from actuality. Even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. Hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy.

Forgetting someone you once loved: it’s like erasing something of yourself forever -freely; Being someone else for a second that will change a lifetime. You let go. You feel lost. You will love again.

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you’re recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a ‘this happened, then that happened’ kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story — and what the character is experiencing in that world — as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex

More interestingly, it could be argued that, if fantasy (and debatably the literature of the fantastic as a whole) has a purpose other than to entertain, it is to show readers how to perceive; an extension of the argument is that fantasy may try to alter readers' perception of reality. Of course, quack religions (etc.) make similar attempts, but a major difference is that, while the latter attempt to convert people to their codified way of thinking, the best fantasy introduces its readers into a playground of rethought perception, where there are no restrictions other than those of the human imagination. In some modes of the fantastic – e.g., magic realism and surrealism – the attempt to alter the reader's perception is overt, but most full-fantasy texts have at their core the urge to change the reader; that is, full fantasy is by definition a subversive literary form.

To be really realistic a description would have to be endless. Where Stendhal describes in one phrase Lucien Leuwen's entrance into a room, the realistic artist ought, logically, to fill several volumes with descriptions of characters and settings, still without succeeding in exhausting every detail. Realism is indefinite enumeration. By this it reveals that its real ambition is conquest, not of the unity, but of the totality of the real world. Now we understand why it should be the official aesthetic of a totalitarian revolution. But the impossibility of such an aesthetic has already been demonstrated. Realistic novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality, because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To write is already to choose. There is thus an arbitrary aspect to reality, just as there is an arbitrary aspect to the ideal, which makes a realistic novel an implicit problem novel. To reduce the unity of the world of fiction to the totality of reality can only be done by means of an a priori judgment which eliminates form, reality, and everything that conflicts with doctrine. Therefore so-called socialist realism is condemned by the very logic of its nihilism to accumulate the advantages of the edifying novel and propaganda literature.

Russian realism was born in the second half of the forties. ... In substance it is a cross between the satirical naturalism of Gogol and an older sentimentalism revived and represented in the thirties and forties by the then enormously influential George Sand. Gogol and George Sand were the father and mother of Russian realism and its accepted masters during the initial stages.

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He

As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.

Degas, more than any other Realist, looked upon the photograph not merely as a means of documentation, but rather as an inspiration: it evoked the spirit of his own imagery of the spontaneous, the fragmentary and the immediate. Thus, in a certain sense, critics of Realism were quite correct to equate the objective, detached, scientific mode of photography, and its emphasis on the descriptive rather than the imaginative or evaluative, with the basic qualities of Realism itself. As Paul Valéry pointed out in an important though little known article: ‘the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters. In verse as in prose, the décor and the exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.… With photography… realism pronounces itself in our Literature’ and, he might have said, in our art as well.

The rocks pummeled her belly. Something rose in her throat and when she tried to speak, from her mouth she dislodged a rock. She was made of rocks. She couldn’t move from the fossilized casing she’d once called her body. Heat crackled nearby. A conversation wove through the fire. A child’s sweaty body curled at her lap, chest rhythms of breathing, up and down, pressing against her. 'I didn’t want to believe it was happening again.

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it. The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction. Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure. Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies. Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral. Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior. (Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)

All these novels in which the authors try desperately to dramatize their own histories, their experiences, to recount their own psychological dramas - this is not literature. It is secretion, just like bile, sweat or tears - and, sometimes even, excretion. It is the literary transcription of 'reality television'. It is all the product of a vulgar unconscious not unlike a small intestine, around which roam the phantasms and affects of those who, now they've been persuaded they have an inner life, don't know what to do with it.

In the place Calliope had bled, a trail of corn sprouted behind her. She picked the two tallest corn shoots then sat beside two large, smooth stone metates for grinding. From within her husk rebozo, she pulled a mano, shucked the corn, laid it on the altar, and with the mano in both hands, she began moving with the weight of her whole body, the strength of her shoulders and back pressing down through her arms, back and forth, shearing, until the corn became a fine yellow powder. The Ancients sang her on as she worked. When the Earth has had enough, she will shake her troubles off. She will shake her troublemakers off. She scooped this and mashed it into the butter of her hands. Rolled it into a ball, flattened it again. Shaped and shaped until the corn grew into a child, who sprang from the stone of her hands, laughing. For she was finished, and sank into the earth, solid, hardened, at peace. And as her corn-made child ran from the mound to the grass below, the spirits intoned. The Earth has all the power she needs. When she decides to use her power, you will know.

It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of "realism" or of "human experience" when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoevski's characters have yet another remarkable feature: throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them.

Я пытался писать обыкновенный роман по методу социалистического реализма — единственному, который я знал, которому учили со школьной парты и далее всю жизнь. Но правда жизни, превращаясь в «правду художественную», почему-то на глазах тускнела, становилась банальной, гладенькой, лживой и, наконец, подлой. Социалистический реализм обязывает писать не столько так, как было, сколько так, как это должно было быть, или, во всяком случае, могло быть. Ложный и лицемерный этот и метод, собственно, и загубил великую в прошлом русскую литературу. Я отказываюсь от него навсегда [11—12].

A shock of light. Unbelievable light. Blood orange swallowing the Albuquerque evening. A pulling in, taking back, reclaiming something stolen. Halfway home from her Saturday-morning lecture, Calliope Santiago drove across the river toward West Mesa and the Sleeping Sisters, ancient cinder-cone volcanoes in the distance marking the stretch of desert where she lived. Only now she could see no farther than two feet ahead of her from the blinding light, the splotches in her eyes bursting like bulbs in an antique camera. She blinked, not sure what she was seeing. She meant to cover her eyes. Meant to shield her sight.

Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you--Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age...Literature, for a while, can be about us...:about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel? ... Supposing...that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward--up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away.

Novelists encounter a world not only overloaded with information but overloaded with novels, possibly overloaded with novels confronting the overload of information. On an immediate social level, the enormity of published work has the effect of isolating readers. The general dispersal of culture into fragmented and miscellaneous units in the information-age has a more pronounced effect on literature, if only because novels typically take longer to read than films take to watch or albums take to listen to. It takes comparatively more effort to know about the same things, therefore it’s less common. The upshot is that it is more difficult to get the kind of basic social-reinforcement around literature that merges individual interests into a scene or community that people want to belong to, which is one of the main reasons it’s now such a challenge for writers to fix coordinates for their work.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

On the face of it, society has little use for depressive realism or indeed for any significant negativity, and certainly spurns any Zerzanian agenda. DR’s evangelism of bleakness is not wanted here. However, a large literature exists arguing for the benefits of learning from negativity and failure (e.g. Ormerod, 2005; Feltham, 2012). Much of this is disingenuous platitude and management hype, but some of it concentrates on the importance of failure in specific, critical circumstances. Insurance professionals must calculate risk, and accident investigators have to learn from black boxes the causes of airplane crashes. In more philosophical terms, Scruton (2010) draws on Schopenhauer’s concept of ‘unscrupulous optimism’ to identify its various fallacies. He argues that we should ‘look with irony and detachment on our actual condition’ (p. 232, italics added), instead of succumbing to the lure of Leftist ‘junk thought.’ Everyone claims to learn something from negatives and DR ‘prophets’ are those most likely to speak the unpopular negatives.

What I find difficult, when I read, is to encounter other people’s achievements passed off as one’s own. I find it difficult to discover literary tradition so warmly embraced and coddled, as if artists existed merely to have flagrant intercourse with the past, guaranteed to draw a crowd but also certain to cover that crowd in an old, heavy breading. I find it difficult when a narrative veers toward soap opera, when characters are explained by their childhoods, when setting is used as spackle to hold together chicken-wire characters who couldn’t even stand up to an artificial wind, when depictions of landscape are intermissions while the author catches his breath and gets another scene ready. I find writing difficult that too readily subscribes to the artistic ideas of other writers, that willingly accepts language as a tool that must be seen and not heard, that believes in happy endings, easy revelations, and bittersweet moments of self-understanding. I find writing difficult that could have been written by anyone. That’s difficult to me, horribly so. Mr. Difficult? It’s not Gaddis. Mr. Difficult is the writer willing to sell short the aims of literature, to serve as its fuming, unwanted ambassador, to apologize for its excesses or near misses, its blind alleys, to insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality and experience and inner sensations, scenes flying jauntily by under the banner of realism, which lately grants it full critical immunity.

She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground, where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star, and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful. Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her. Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship? She’d never know. What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice. Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself. She hadn’t. Awareness must come. And it did. Too late. If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half-starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe. She knew that, deep inside. Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms. These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world. Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl. She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust. She swept it away on her jeans. A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this. But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.  

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.

Agnes Tattle was the only person he’d ever met who was strong enough to look life right in the eye and spit. It must be the mathematics in her background. Such courageous realism certainly didn’t come from the study of English literature.

Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence.

I think the artist painted me not for the sake of literature, but for the sake of the two symmetrical warts on my forehead: a phenomenon, they say. They have no ideas, so now they trade on phenomena. And how well my warts came out in this portrait—to the life! This they call realism. ==========

Our utmost desire: to enhance children's literature with imagery and realism...

Decades after little Colleen’s death, my sister Kathy still loves her daughter dearly. Colleen was born with cerebral palsy. She died in Kath’s arms in a rocking chair at the age of six. They were listening to a music box that looked very much like a smiling pink bunny. The opening quote in this book, “I will love you forever, but I’ll only miss you for the rest of my life,” is from Kath’s nightly prayers to her child. Colleen couldn’t really talk or walk very well, but loved untying my mother’s tennis shoes and then laughing. When Mom died decades later we sent her off in tennis shoes so Colleen would have something to untie in Heaven. In the meantime, Dad had probably been taking really good care of her up there. He must have been aching to hug her for all of her six years on earth. Mom’s spirit comes back to play with great grandchildren she’d never met or had a chance to love while she was still – I almost said “among the living.” In my family, though, the dead don’t always stay that way. You can be among the living without technically being alive. Mom comes back to play, but Dad shows up only in emergencies. They are both watching over their loved ones. “The Mourning After” is dedicated to all those we have had the joy of loving before they’ve slipped away to the other side. It then celebrates the joy of re-unions.

There is, however, one other figurative representative of humanity in which we fail to recognize our own scornful and pitiful selves at our peril. That pathetic figure reflecting the readers back to themselves very uncomfortably is Gollum. Seldom or perhaps never in the field of human literature has the human soul in a state of addiction to sin been portrayed with such psychological realism and spiritual brilliance.

Los humanos buscan respuestas constantemente. Pero saben que no hay ninguna.

In the early Soviet years, before ‘socialist realism’ became the prescribed genre in literature, painting, film and even music, the first big new thing in the arts under Communism was ‘Prolekult’, proletarian culture. The idea was that art would reflect the experience of people in the workplace, and many artists went to factories to produce work collectively in teams rather than individually. ‘The “I” of bourgeois culture would yield to the “we” of the new world,’ as Lunacharsky said. Large amounts of money were spent on projects like building an orchestra from the sound of clanking factory machinery, and replacing old paintings in museums with often abstract new pieces produced in working conditions by a team of labourers and artists together. This was the first ‘cultural revolution’ under Communism, which aimed to destroy everything old and start anew.

The birds eyes were half-human. He traced the outline of the carving. Perhaps it bestowed on him some kind of secret ancestral power

Stendhal knows the source of his greatest happiness and his worst misery: the reflexivity of his spiritual life. When he loves, enjoys beauty, feels free and unconstrained, he realizes not only the bliss of these feelings but, at the same time, the happiness of being aware of this happiness. But now that he ought to be completely absorbed by his happiness and feel redeemed from all his limitations and inadequacies, he is still full of problems and doubts: Is that the whole story?—he asks himself. Is that what they call love? Is it possible to love, to feel, to be delighted and yet to observe oneself so coolly and so calmly? Stendhal’s answer is by no means the usual one, which assumes the existence of an insurmountable gulf between feeling and reason, passion and reflexion, love and ambition, but is based on the assumption that modern man simply feels differently, is enraptured and enthusiastic differently from a contemporary of Racine or Rousseau. For them, spontaneity and reflexivity of the emotions were incompatible, for Stendhal and his heroes they are quite inseparable; none of their passions is so strong as the desire to be constantly calling themselves to account for what is going on inside them. Compared with the older literature, this self consciousness implies just as profound a change as Stendhal’s realism, and the overcoming of classical-romantic psychology is just as strictly one of the preconditions of his art as the abolition of the alternative between the romantic escape from the world and the anti-romantic belief in the world.

Magical realism, celebrated as Colombia’s gift to Latin American literature, is within the country simply journalism. Gabriel García Márquez wrote of what he saw. He was an observer, a practicing journalist for most of his life, who just happened to live in a land where heaven and earth converge on a regular basis to reveal glimpses of the divine.

Încercarea de a reprezenta entităţi mai largi prin mici detalii a condus la un realism şi o concreteţe a imaginii care contrastează în mod straniu cu ambiguitatea nebuloasă a efectului general. Zgomotul apei în care sare o broască, ţîrîitul ascuţit al greierilor, parfumul unei flori necunoscute pot fi imaginea centrală în jurul căreia se construieşte un poem japonez. Aici putem detecta influenţa doctrinei budiste Zen, susținea, între altele, că iluminarea poate veni din orice percepție. Săritura broaştei ce tulbură liniştea profundă a unui iaz putea fi şi ea un med de a obţine iluminarea, asemeni unei autentice întruchipări a vieţii.

Pedro da Maia amava! Era um amor à Romeu, vindo de repente numa troca de olhares fatal e deslumbradora, uma dessas paixões que assaltam uma existência, a assolam como um furacão, arrancando a vontade, a razão, os respeitos humanos e empurrando-os de roldão aos abismos.

The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories...The real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’.

Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while. “What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked him. “You mean the afterlife?” “No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go black, like a phone screen turning off? Or do you slip into something strange in the middle, like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re both here and there?” Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw Nadia seeing him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I think it would be like falling asleep. You’d dream before you were gone.

✓Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve. ✓Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists? ✓History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole. ✓I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative. ✓Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. ✓I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves ✓The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism. ✓If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years. ✓A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.

When we are asked 'what is socialist realism?' and we answer: acquaint yourself with all the best books by Soviet writers, we often see disappointment on the faces of our questioners. We are expected to offer prescriptions! What is amazing is that the more foreign writers talk about artistic freedom, saying that we Soviet writers are leveling and regimenting literature, the more insistently, even aggressively they demand that we give them, at last, a precise answer to the question 'What is socialist realism and how does this method operate?' It seems to me that partially because of their aggressive demands these writers receive a recipe of sorts: socialist realism requires 50 percent positive, 5 percent negative hero, 1 percent social contradictions, 1 percent inspired romanticism, and 100 percent aqua distillata. But art is not created by recipes.

All the latchkey children cursed and smashed bottles, teased about underwear, and puffed on those unfiltered cigarettes that only the cowboys could roll.

Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of “Critical Realism” with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

JMG: Many of your novels are rooted in the tradition of magic. In writing The Probable Future, how did you manage to blur the lines between fantasy and reality but still make the plot events seem plausible? How do you trust your readers to make that leap and still identify with—and relate to—your characters? AH: I feel that the tradition of literature, of storytelling, is rooted in magic. Realism seems to me a newer, less interesting tradition. I grew up reading fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy. As far as making the leap to belief, as soon as a reader opens a book he or she must suspend belief—marks on paper become a real world. The next leap, to identify and relate with fantastical occurrences, seems easy to me. The sort of magic I write about is that which is rooted in the real world—the probable and the possible.

The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater's Studies in the Renaissance his 'golden book' and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler's and Hildebrand's doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic's power to shape the evolution of art. In Wilde's dialogue of 1890, 'The True Function and Value of Criticism,' the straight man Ernest contends that 'the Greeks had no art-critics': 'By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.' The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him: I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it. According to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact 'a nation of art-critics.' The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: 'I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.' Art is secondary from the start. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has already been shaped by art? 'The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.

When we paint, we paint with truth - and when live, we live without; so we dream and yet not sleep for sleep takes our dreams and does not trade it with doubt.

When we paint, we paint with truth - and when live, we live without it; so we dream and yet not sleep for sleep takes our dreams;

The truth! The truth! Some minds wrote about - and yet - no truth; So I dared to write - but still there was no truth; So I call on truth itself, for it is known and yet does not write;

The truthfulness and historical exactitude of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation, of the education of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This method in fiction and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.

Poetry is the heart of the soul.

My soul is made out of poetry.

Also known as the English Renaissance, the Elizabethan era was the golden age of English literature. This time period, which ran approximately from 1558 to 1603, was an unparalleled era of growth and quality of the written word, characterized by the development of the novel, new and lasting innovations in poetry, and new styles of theater

We were given one heart - yet we break it so carelessly.

Change is beautiful inside a world made out of constant expectations.

I do believe that the Catholic Church is too brocken to be saved by faith - it would take true believe to build something like it again.

The realistic novels of George Eliot appeared after p England wearied of the fanciful fictions of Walter Scott. A generation passed by before the reaction set in with full force. Both writers wrote as they did, largely in obedience to the tendencies of their times, upon which they reacted and were reacted upon. They wrote because of personal repressions. Their methods of of expression were different , because of a desire to comply somewhat with literary traditions. Romanticism was fashionable in 1830, while realism was in the air in 1860.

We love each other. That’s all we need to make it work.” “So said every werewolf before his craving overtook him and his witch lover killed his naïve, stupid ass. We always love them. Our love for witches has never been an issue.

Art puts me trough life and trough art I see life.

Для того, кто любит, ничего не бывает долгим.

Вот я читаю по камешкам и узнаю, что ждет человека, который сел возле них или прямо на них. Потому что, как я понял, человек никогда не садится случайно. Каждый усаживается так, как ему на роду написано. Вы этого не замечали? Вот вы направляетесь к какому-то месту, вам кажется, что там красиво, и вы собираетесь там сесть, но вдруг замечаете, что рядом еще красивее. Вы садитесь, но вдруг понимаете, что вам там что-то не по душе, и вы пересаживаетесь на другое место, и вас вдруг охватывает радость, вы ложитесь на песок и чувствуете, что все прекрасно и весь мир принадлежит вам. Вы нашли себе место, которое было вам предназначено и которое ждало вас.

For Levi, the fault lay in part with Améry’s intransigence, his elevation of bitterness to an ethical imperative (for his part, Améry disparaged Levi as “the forgiver”). Favoring Levi’s suppositions is the vast clinical literature on the benefits of positive illusions and the deleterious psychological effects of “depressive realism.

The aura of the place had shifted. Maybe I’d previously read or heard something about the cape. I don’t believe in ghosts, per se, but the mind is most definitely a haunted place.

The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand – and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as modernism. In other European countries it was given different names, but the ingredients were essentially similar, and they revolutionized the visual arts as well as literature. Realism of the sort that it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated.

How magnificent a lifetime feels once it is held together by something that is worth loving.

I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always 'has the standard of the arts in his power,' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not 'simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.

The present supply of realism is nothing but the publisher's answer to a cheap and fickle demand...if realism be a form of art, the newspaper is a permanent contribution to literature.

J.D. Steelritter, like many older adults, is kind of a bigot. Mark Nechtr, like most young people in this awkward age, is NOT. But his aracism derives, he'd admit, from reasons that are totally self-interested. If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders—well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian meta-fiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor. It's the end of the long, long, long race you're watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners' faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.

I hate rules in fiction, and I love experimentation. I believe literature is the minefield of the imagination — a place of complexities as much as it is a place of discovery and joy. I understand that critics need definitions so they can study literature, but the divisions they establish only flatten out the possibilities. I love crossovers between horror and fantasy or historical fiction and suspense or between social realism and poetry.

Throughout the novel there is a very carefully planned selection of episodes and incidents, so that “realism,” if interpreted to mean a kind of journalistic reportage, is misleading. Every detail in Madame Bovary is chosen for a purpose and is closely related to everything else that precedes and follows it, to an extent that may not be evident (or possible) in real life. There is profound artistry involved in what is selected and omitted and in what weight is given to specific incidents.

I’m starving of myself.