Real World Quotes

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one.”
― Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”
― Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“Let us drop our 'tin ear' and listen to the sounds of the 'real' world veiled beyond our inattention, and overwhelmed by the smoke and mirrors of superficiality. ("Like a frozen image")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“What had been in my head for so long would now be out in the real world, no longer afloat in my foreverland of ambiguities.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.
Sometimes I just survive.
But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.
That's when the stories show up in me.
They find me all the time.
They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.
The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.
Maybe they all just merge into one.
We'll see, I guess.
I'll let you know when I decide.”
― Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl

“And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I'm used to the security of living behind my online profiles and the clip art advertisdements I create to define me. I can be whoever I want to be in that world. I can be funny, deep, pensive, eccentric. I can be the best version of myself. I can make all the right decisions. I can delete my flaws by pressing a button.

In the real world anything can happen. It's like stepping onto an icy surface--you have to adjust your footing or you'll slip and fall. Your movements become rigid and unsure because behind all the fancy gadgets and all that digital armor, you realize you're just flesh and bones.”
― Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

“Imagination is the parallel universe of a writer. If he is not responding to you in this world, he is probably responding to someone in the imaginary world.”
― Heenashree Khandelwal

“I'd decided the campus was just a place to hide. There were some campus freaks who stayed on forever. The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you how hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.”
― Charles Bukowski , Ham on Rye

“The rEaL wOrLd is but a fictional place where those who have narrow minds and shallow imagination compile their oppressive ideas of what rEaLiTy only should be.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe

“And it's his illusions about what
constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed”
― Luke Rhineheart

“I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it?”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“You have to be a responsible adult and support yourself because no one else is going to do it for you.”
― Susane Colasanti, Take Me There

“Real life doesn't grant us many of the more than useful possibilities people can come out with in fiction.”
― Camilo Gomes Jr, Em memória

“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, Luka and the Fire of Life

“Because you’re right. Bad stuff happens. But the real world is also all the things we do about the bad stuff. We’re the real world, too.”
― Sara Pennypacker, Here in the Real World

“An interpretation [of a formal system] will be meaningful to the extent that is accurately reflects some isomorphism to the real world.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“If you want to leave the real world and enter a beautiful oil painting or an interesting novel, then you have not been able to enrich your world in the real world!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“You used to walk across town in the pouring rain to use our encyclopedias. We're pretty confident that we can get your kid to click and drag." I think it was the kid's walk in the rain that constituted the real education, at least of the senses and the imagination., Perhaps the child with the CD-ROM encyclopedia will stray from the task at hand, but wandering in a book or a computer takes place within more constricted and less sensual parameters. It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value. Both rural and urban walking have for two centuries been prime ways of exploring the unpredictable and the incalculable, but they are now under assault on many fronts.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“In life, we are taught to believe and experience illusions and fantasies about different things other than reality.

There comes a time and experience in life where you meet reality from the illusion.

We talk about so many different things without experience and that's why we don't know what is the real experience is all about hence we don't know what it is to be motivated and inspired when we haven't experienced reality.”
― Aiyaz Uddin, Science Behind A Perfect Life

“It's hard when a vision exists in a perfect state in your mind because ushering that dream into the real world feels like you're endangering it, like you're taking a baseball bat to something you love.”
― Katherine Morgan Schafler, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

“Now that I was living closer to
nature, I realized that this was the real world, very
different from the man-made world of automobiles,
computers and skyscrapers. Man was a god of sorts
in his own sphere, but on a lovely mountainside he
is no more important than an ant—and not half as
industrious!”
― Ruskin Bond, The Beauty of All My Days: A Memoir [Hardcover] RUSKIN BOND

“An interpretation [of a formal system] will be meaningful to the extent that it accurately reflects some isomorphism to the real world.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Real life is just a whisker away, as you know full well yourself, deep down inside.”
― H.M. Forester, The Scent of Reality and other short stories

“All I knew for certain was that somehow this God managed to see good in me when I could only see bad in myself. This God seemed determined not to give up on me, even when I felt like giving up on myself. To me, God had been little more than a fairytale. To me He was an abstract concept or set of ideas, not a living person who was all-powerful and real. And yet this fairytale was beginning to break out of its pages into the real world—into my life.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“As in the "real" world---the adult world---there is a pecking order in a kid's world, as well. It's an unwritten code and pre-existing class system you'll never find recorded in the archives of the school library or indelibly etched into the archway of the administration building. Nonetheless, it is there, perhaps even more real than if it was written down. Those who have mastered its ways achieve a kind of "Jedi-knight" status, and with that comes a certain immunity from it ever "boomeranging" back at them. It's an adolescent adaptation of the old king of the hill game with hundreds continually clamoring toward the top.”
― Jeff Kinley

“Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many
and varied games.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a necessary externality to the game.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top-ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level in bargaining with your boss. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you secretly wanted to do all those years ago... Only now you can’t remember.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory