Quotes & Sayings About A Realist

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist. — Ellen Glasgow

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. — Virginia Woolf

I want no part of peace with savages who throw acid on and gun down young girls going to school. I would prefer to crush them and kill them wherever they exist. That's not being a warmonger. It's being a realist. — Allen West

Someone told me I'm a cynical fatalist but I prefer the term realist. — Wade Kelly

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. — Andy Warhol

Sharon was a realist. He recognized, as did Ben-Gurion and Dayan, that the Arabs had as legitimate a claim to this land as we did, and that they possessed pride and courage and anger, against which no rejoinder existed except the sword. — Steven Pressfield

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

As long as the positive thinking doesn't become so extreme that you are in denial of reality, I don't like to see myself as a positive nor a negative type of person but primarily a realist in search of solutions to acknowledged problems......ignoring a problem doesn't make it disappear , that kind of thought process is just wishful thinking and sooner or later the reality will come around and bite you. — John Balmer

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing. — Sydney J. Harris

I am ... a realist. The magnitude of what one terms license or civil liberties or personal freedom has got to be adjusted to the circumstances. — Lee Kuan Yew

There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts. — Kathy Acker

To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make! — Criss Jami

A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist. — Beau Willimon

A recurrent theme in Kissinger's early writing is the historical ignorance of the typical American decision-maker. Lawyers, he remarked in 1968, are the "single most important group in Government, but they do have this drawback - a deficiency in history." For Kissinger, history was doubly important: as a source of illuminating analogies and as the defining factor in national self-understanding. Americans might doubt history's importance, but, as Kissinger wrote, "Europeans, living on a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, feel in their bones that history is more complicated than systems analysis."
-Foreign Affairs, The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered, By Niall Ferguson — Niall Ferguson

Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What's more, he's taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn't easy to believe in something after you know what it's really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code. — Linda Goodman

This is forever." Pulling back to see her expression, Craig was gratified to see the surprise in her eyes. "You really think so?" she whispered back. "Aye," he told her as he kissed her sweet mouth. "I can't lose you again. No matter what happens I will fight like fuck to keep you." Rain gave him a slow, sweet, and slightly smug smile that made him laugh. "And so the realist becomes a romantic." He — Samantha Young

The apprentice realist uses line as a net to capture his prey, an imitation of reality. But soon he becomes enchanted with line as a thing. It becomes a servant of his pleasure. — Rene Huyghe

Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtuesare economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will. — Octavia Spencer

What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real. — Steven Millhauser

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees ... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete ... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete. — Philip Pearlstein

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live. Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom. Only a person who risks is free. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; and the realist adjusts the sails — William Arthur Ward

Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top."). — Terry Pratchett

I'm forever hopeful," he said. "That's what friends do. They hope. They have faith in each other."

"Well, I have faith that she'll forget," I said, hiking my backpack up onto my shoulders. "You have to be a realist with Caro."

"I'm a hopeful realist," Drew said. "I'm a healist! Like those guys on TV late at night that cure people of cancer." He grinned down at me. — Robin Benway

So that when man can be in great distress having been betrayed and deserted by all friends he may find consolation in the idea that an ever true friend was still there to help him, to support him and that He was Almighty and could do anything. The idea of God is helpful to man in distress.
Society has to fight out this belief as well as was fought the idol worship and the narrow conception of religion. Similarly, when man tries to stand on his own legs, and become a realist he shall have to throw the faith aside, and to face manfully all the distress, trouble, in which the circumstances may throw him. — Bhagat Singh

This is what we have all come to Cannes for: for something different, experimental, a tilting at windmills, a great big pole-vault over the barrier of normality by someone who feels that the possibilities of cinema have not been exhausted by conventional realist drama. — Peter Bradshaw

I'm a realist. Just because you had sex once doesn't mean you have to fall in love. — Candace Bushnell

People want a cop-out, listen I'm a realist and I talk about motivation, talk about all the things it takes to be greater or are important to win and people want to use excuses all the time. — Mike Ditka

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. — Arthur Symons

I'm quite optimistic. I'm also a realist. And I hope, you know, things work out. I don't think that the world will ever know peace. Complete peace in all countries. I think perhaps that's not in our makeup to do this although we can pray for it and work for it. But I think that the building blocks of peace are moving into shape, and I think that the world is going to be a better place. — Shirley Temple

You just can't get anything done. You can't get hearings, you can't get legislation, you can't get responses by the regulatory agencies - you can't get anything done. I'm a realist. I don't work harder and harder to get less and less. — Ralph Nader

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors. — Joan Fontaine

To me, what I define as defiance, in some ways, is knowing the "reality" and having the ability to possess a realist mindstate yet still working towards the fantasy and still being childish. While still having the understanding and capacity that would generally inspire pessimism: some sort of more realist perspective that I think most people classify as adult. Anything like that and anything that's sort of fun. — Alex Ebert

A realist is a man who insists on making the same mistakes his grandfather did. — Benjamin Disraeli

I'm a realist and I always have been. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

There's evil in the world, all right. Being aware of it makes you a realist, not a paranoid. — Dean Koontz

Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset. — Jack McDevitt

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism. — Arne Glimcher

In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. — David Ben-Gurion

Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula's spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful. — Kate Atkinson

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind. — Brenda Walker

Evelyn: ...Don't take my negativity for lack of self-confidence. I'm just a realist.
Maddie: Realistically dumb. — Rachel Hera

World unity is the wish of the hopeful, the goal of the idealist and the dream of the romantic. Yet it is folly to the realist and a lie to the innocent. — Don Williams

You are impossible. You are only a realist, and therefore nothing happens to you. — August Strindberg

To my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief ... Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Even though I'm a realist, I try to let the medium show and allow it a certain degree of freedom. — William C. Wright

Does his family have money?" I asked.
"No, Ulises's family doesn't have money," said Requena. "Actually, the only family he has is his mother, right? Or at least I've never heard of anyone else."
"I know his whole family," said Pancho. "I knew Ulises Lima long before any of you, long before Belano, and his mother is the only family he has. He's broke, that I can promise you."
"Then how could he finance two issues of a magazine?"
"Selling weed," said Pancho. The other two were quiet, but they didn't deny it.
"I can't believe it," I said.
"Well, it's true. The money comes from marijuana."
"Shit."
"He goes and gets it in Acapulco and then he delivers it to his clients in Mexico City."
"Shut up, Pancho," said Barrios.
"Why should I shut up? The kid's a fucking visceral realist, isn't he? So why do I have to shut up? — Roberto Bolano

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic. — Peter Drucker

A mystic is a spiritual realist, a person for whom the Invisible is a matter of more or less firsthand experience. — Frances Parkinson Keyes

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one. — Colm Toibin

Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn't true, would you hit him or smile? That's how easy it is to tell. — Alexei Panshin

I am a realist. I expect miracles. — Wayne Dyer

Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist. — David Ben-Gurion

The supernatural, and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal. Few would argue with these conclusions. Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The question is: "Can this be done?" The answer is: "Of course not." One would look silly attempting such a thing. Consequently, the realistic horror writer, wielding the hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must really know the normal world, and deeply take for granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. — Thomas Ligotti

The reclusive man who marries the gregarious woman, the timid woman who marries the courageous man, the idealist who marries the realist we can all see these unions: the marriages in which tenderness meets loyalty, where generosity sweetens moroseness, where a sense of beauty eases some aridity of the spirit, are not so easy for outsiders to recognize; the parties themselves may not be fully aware of such elements in a good match. — Robertson Davies

People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist. — Joan Baez

I'm no optimist", she said as she opened the cabinet door. " I'm just a realist who smiles too much. — Tiffany Reisz

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I guess we need to keep adjusting our dreams to fit reality, because life is not going to cooperate. Maybe this makes me a defeatist, but I'd prefer to think of myself as realist. — Cassia Leo

I like myself. I have never once hated myself.
My high specs, my half decent looks,
My pessimistic, realist point of view.
I don't hate any of it at all. But, for the first time,
I feel like I could hate myself.

The Yukino Yukinoshita
I've seen all this time was always beautiful, pure,
Never told a lie, and could stand on her own feet even-
With nobody to lean on.
I'm pretty sure I always admired her for that.
I forced my own expectations and ideals on her,
Let myself think I understood her, and let myself be dissapointed.

I cautioned myself against this time and time again,
But I still haven't gotten over it.
Even Yukino Yukinoshita tells lies.
I couldn't even accept such an obvious fact,
And for that...I...hate myself
- Hachiman Hikigaya — Wataru Watari

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals? — Michael Shaara

Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist). — Max Stirner

My mother is a realist, and she's had biological and adoptive children, and she said it's no different: No matter what, they're putting a stranger into your arms. You don't know them yet. — Katherine Heigl

While I support a more comprehensive bill and hope a more extensive package will eventually past the Senate, I also am a realist and know that we must not let the perfect bill be the enemy of real reform. — John McCain

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Why are we born? We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes. — Studs Terkel

I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing. — Steven Morrissey

I'm more of a realist when it comes to life, and I'd much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life. — Kevin Hart

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? — Cormac McCarthy

I'm a realist, okay? I have been for a long time. I need to be, and you liking me-wanting to take me out on a date and do-"
"Really fun and interesting things to you." he supplied.
I flushed. "Yeah, that."
"Naughty things that are going to make you feel so good," Jax continued, and his words and the way he spoke them turned me on like I'd never been before. "That's what I want to do to you. — J. Lynn

We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. — Noam Chomsky

Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds. — Anna Funder

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

I have a lot of courage. I'm a realist. — Elisabeth Rohm

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism — Charles Eisenstein

America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists. — Dortha Jackson

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for. — C. JoyBell C.

You're not a realist unless you believe in miracles. — Anwar Sadat

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist. — John Barth

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist. — John Barth

I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist. — Bill Maher

However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political.
Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation? — Hans J. Morgenthau

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible. — Todd Gitlin

Art Education is as important for a realist artist as an Alphabet is to learn a language. — Igor Babailov

Whenever I am in my videos, it's rare. A lot of it is, they feel more live and hyper-realist, rather than fantasy. People would just be like, "Oh, Skrillex is acting in this video," and it wouldn't work as well. — Skrillex

Empathy and a huge imagination explain a lot of mysteries in the universe. — Shannon L. Alder

In my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: "My Lord and My God!" Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: "I will not believe until I see. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Where the realist would say, "One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach," the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact. — John Gardner

I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change. — Joseph Conrad

For every person who rides with a moral high-horse, they also have a dead horse that they haven't fed lying somewhere out of sight. — Zack W. Van

Even a committed realist will concede that there are many situations where an absolute standard of truth is unavailable. And yet, confronted with such situations, we often continue to act as if right and wrong are the relevant yardsticks. — Kathryn Schulz

Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy on pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations? — Colin Powell

[The Devil] And after all, who knows whether proof of the devil is also proof of God? I want to join an idealist society and form an opposition within it: 'I'm a realist,' I'll say, 'not a materialist,' heh, heh! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency ... The Realist position is probably the one which most mathematicians would prefer to take. It is not until he becomes aware of some of the difficulties in set theory that he would even begin to question it. If these difficulties particularly upset him, he will rush to the shelter of Formalism, while his normal position will be somewhere between the two, trying to enjoy the best of two worlds. — Paul Cohen

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him. — George Santayana

And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes. — V.C. Andrews

I'm a realist all the way. I'm too cynical to be an optimist. But I've lived too much of a charmed life so far to ever be a pessimist. — Anthony Jeselnik

When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I'm a little bit more of a realist now. I think there's a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it's more about choosing your battles. — Conor Oberst

I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn't win the race. I am a realist. — Jean Alesi