As Real As It Gets Quotes & Sayings

It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren. — Josiah Bancroft

I view it as a real competition. We're in a business where, you know what, there's no babies here. You go out, win the job and take it. I've been told by management, for the most part, that we're going to play the best people. Obviously, you've got to consider stuff like contracts - that's a reality of the game. But still, when it gets down to it, we're going to try and pick the guy that deserves to win the job. — Willie Randolph

I always loved horror as a kid. On the one hand, I really love monsters, because in a way I feel like I related to their outsider status and like the sentimental romantic plight of the monster. More importantly though I feel like people are completely motivated by fear, especially with our political system here in America which is just degenerating into more and more fear mongering and it gets in the way of real discourse, plus it's just something I'm obsessive about and have always been a little bit of a paranoid guy. — Larry Fessenden

The cab moves for a moment but then I see the blurry, glowing red lights through the downpour against my face and heavy lens of tears covering my eyes. The cab's brake lights. The car has stopped, as have I-and then I see the back door open.
It's my Jack Henry.
He gets out of the cab and stands in the heavy rain looking back at me. I don't know how-because my body has turned to mush-but I'm off my knees and running toward him.
... I touch his face because I can't believe he's real. You sort of have a beard. Almost. I love it. It's sexy. — Georgia Cates

Music is like magic, there's a certain feeling you get
When you real and you spit and people are feeling your shit
This is your moment, and every single minute you spend
Tryna hold on to it because you may never get it again
So while you're in it, try to get as much shit as you can
And when your run is over just admit when it's at its end
Because I'm at the end of my wits with half the shit gets in — Eminem

As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing. — Haruki Murakami

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things. — Constantin Brancusi

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood. — Hermann Hesse

Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality ... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world
which is never so bad as all that. — Leonard Woolf

Perhaps you had an older brother who was a brilliant student. He got A's in school; you made only C's, and you never heard the last of it. So you believed that you could never succeed in life as he could. He got A's and you got C's, so you reasoned that you were consigned to getting C's all your life. Apparently you never realized that some of those who failed to get high grades in school have been the greatest successes outside of school. Just because somebody gets an A in college doesn't make him the greatest man in the United States, because maybe his A's will stop when he gets his diploma, and the fellow who got C's in school will go on later to get the real A's in life. — Anonymous

No personality as strong as Zelda's could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has "kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more," cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it's these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be.
But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic but Zelda's the only God I have left now. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Your funny gets developed pretty early on. Comedy requires that you understand as much as possible about the viewpoints of all people and everything that's going on around you. It genuinely requires a true point of view, a real sense of your own view of things in the world. — Elizabeth Banks

BISMILLAH
It's a habit of yours to walk slowly.
You hold a grudge for years.
With such heaviness, how can you be modest?
With such attachments, do you expect to arrive anywhere?
Be wide as the air to learn a secret.
Right now you're equal portions clay
and water, thick mud.
Abraham learned how the sun and moon and the stars all set. He said, No longer will I try to assign partners for God.
You are so weak. Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave
till it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know.
You're trying to live your life in open scaffolding.
Say Bismillah, In the name of God,
as the priest does with a knife when he offers an animal.
Bismillah your old self
to find your real name. — Rumi

There is a place deep, deep inside every person that is hidden and hard to find. If things get bad enough and life gets too hard, though, some people will go to that place and never come back from it. Certainly, all outward appearances will suggest otherwise. They will look as they always did. They may even act somewhat like their old selves, but the trut is, the real truth is that they are hiding in this place deep inside where no one can touch or hurt them anymore. — Victoria Forester

There aren't any cameras here. This isn't for show.
This is as real and as awful and as wonderful as it gets. I'd hold her forever if she'd let me. — Erin Watt

I was a big reader. I could spend whole days absorbed in a book, whole weekends in the library or the park, completely oblivious to my surroundings. 'Escapism', I suppose they'd call it, but I never really liked that term much myself. I mean, who is it exactly who gets to decide which parts of your life are real and which parts are only allowed to count as an escape from that reality? I preferred to think that good books were my real life and all the other stuff - school, chores, all the rest of it - was just an interruption. — Jess Vallance

This book is easy to understand and gets your attention. The real life examples are effective in delivering the message on the tremendous power of personal accountability. At the Callaway Energy Center, we trained our leaders on personal accountability and used this book as a guide. This resulted in notable improvements in our teamwork, engagement, accountability, and performance. I highly recommend it." - Fadi Diya, vice president, nuclear operations, Ameren Corporation — Mark Samuel

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life. — Richard Ford

Her heard turned so her lips were at his ear. "I think that's about as real as it gets," she whispered. — Kristen Ashley

Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love. — Julian Gough

Second - and this is by far the bigger emphasis and the one that gets to the heart of this book - we wanted to bring the idea of working on relational and emotional issues back into the mainstream of spiritual growth. Spiritual growth should affect relationship problems, emotional problems, and all other problems of life. There is no such thing as our "spiritual life" and then our "real life." It is all one. — Henry Cloud

The real test of progress is how we love God and our neighbor. Everything else is fluff, and potentially dangerous fluff, at that. It gets in the eyes, so that we no longer see clearly as God sees — Michael Pocock

I like her. She makes life interesting. She, herself, is interesting, I suppose. She talks right from the heart. I appreciate her frankness and I like the fact that she doesn't force the natural flow of a conversation. There's personality in her words. She thus gets to the core of things and that's important because with her - I can talk knowing that the talk is real! Oh believe me, it's amazingly real! And she also gives me the opportunity to listen as fully and completely as possible. And I can't seem to get her out of my head [ ... ] — Virginia Woolf

Here's the bottom line: I can't play someone if I can't figure out what he cares about. Everybody cares about something, even a rough character. It defines where we step in life. As soon as you find out what somebody cares about, then it all gets real. — William Fichtner

...take a page from the life of the little bee. People as a rule think that it gets honey right from the flower. They are mistaken. All it gets is a little sweet water. But it takes that water, retires, adds something to it from itself, and by a process of its own makes it into honey...go to the Bible as the bee to the flower, and 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest'. Thus, through a process of his own, he is to bring forth the real spiritual honey... — Hiram Alfred Cody

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being. — Charlie Kaufman

Please be real."
His hand in my hair stilled, curled around my head and Hop whispered back, "Lady, I'm as real as it gets. — Kristen Ashley

A solid base for any comedy is just honesty and truth, and it coming from a real place. As surreal as this show gets and is, ultimately, we're dealing with a character that most can't see the way that I can see it. — Elijah Wood

And if clever rabbit doesn't quite have what it takes, abrasive Eeyore certainly doesn't either. Why not? Because of what we could call the Eeyore Attitude. You might say the while rabbit's little routine is that of knowledge for the sake of being clever, and while Owl's is that of knowledge for the sake of appearing wise, Eeyore's is knowledge for the sake of complaining about something. As anyone who doesn't have it can see, the Eeyore attitude gets in the way of things like wisdom and happiness, and pretty much prevents any sort of real accomplishment in life. — Benjamin Hoff

One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre - just into nothingness, as smoke. Don't get attached to anything. This attachment takes you away from your real being; you become focused on the thing to which you are attached. Your awareness gets lost in things, in money, in people, in power. And there are a thousand and one things, the whole thick jungle around you, to be lost in. Remember, non-attachment is the secret of finding yourself, then awareness can turn inwards because you don't have anything outside to catch hold of. It is free, and in this freedom you can know your self-nature. — Rajneesh

I think that, generally, people of the world typify a "free and wild" person as someone who's uprooted, detached and uninhibited. But I don't believe in that kind of freedom. I think that's an infantile concept. Freedom means something when it has escaped something! Those people who escaped things - their inner cages, cages set by others around them - when those people are able to roam free and say, "This is who I am because this is who I choose to be", THAT is freedom. Freedom isn't being stupid; freedom is being so smart that you develop a strength strong enough to break free and become your own person. A better person than what your circumstances would like to define you as. — C. JoyBell C.

But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it's frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what's going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age. It probably gets less slow as you get older and more of the world is behind you, and less ahead, but very few people of our generation are going to find this exchange attractive, I'll bet. — David Foster Wallace

Every part of me pulses with electric energy. Every synapse is firing, every part of me is alert, awake, and what I think is that this, this feeling, this is real. This feeling of being absolutely alive, absolutely in this moment, this is as real as it gets. — Theresa Alan

Kathy Burke has been a real inspiration. I think she's brilliant. I like the fact she doesn't care what she looks like on TV and just gets really into character. Obviously, she can do drama as well, but it's her comedy I love. — Sheridan Smith

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember. — Regina Spektor

This is for girls who have the tendency to stay up at night listening to music that reminds them of their current situation. Who hide their fears, hurt, pain and tears under the smiles, laughs and giggles on a daily basis. The girls who wear their heart on their sleeve. The girls who pray that things will work out just once and they'll be satisfied. The girls who sceam and cry to their pillows because everyone else fails to listen. The girls who have so many secrets but wont tell a soul. The girls who have mistakes and regrets as a daily moral. The girls that never win. The girls that stay up all night thinking about that one boy and hoping that he'll notice her one day. The girls who take life as it comes, to the girls who are hoping that it'll get better somewhere down the road. For the girls who love with all their heart although it always gets broken. To girls who think it's over. To real girls, to all girls: You're beautiful. — Zayn Malik

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. — John Locke

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. — Billy Collins

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?' — Zack Snyder

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?
Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.
The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Acting for me was an escape and it wasn't until Smoke Signals that made me realize that acting is a personal development and challenge to grow. Smoke Signals really mirrored the way I grew up and how I felt, and that movie was the first time I'd dealt with my parents' death and how I felt that loss and sadness and anger. After that movie I said, "Y'know what, I have to realistically wear my emotions now when I do a job. That's gotta be as real as it gets. It's not just dialogue anymore." — Adam Beach

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life' - he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. In fact, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it. — George Saunders

I don't like to use the words "real women," honestly. I like to use the word woman. And I say that because there are so many women out there who are naturally thin, or are naturally curvy, and I think when we start putting a label on the type of woman it gets misconstrued and starts to offend people. At the end of the day we just all want to be known as women or models or actresses or whatever. — Ashley Graham

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets. — J. Courtney Sullivan

For me it's about the character, not as much about the genre of it [movie]. I'm excited that I get to work and play interesting characters and I'm not just the girl who gets to play the girlfriend or the wife. I get to play real women who have struggles and troubles and passions and that's always what I hope to do no matter what format that lies in. — Ali Larter

A lot of people feel like urban fantasy is a shortcut that gets you around world-building, because it's set "in the real world." But it doesn't really work that way, as I found out. You have to come up with just as consistent an internal cosmology and magic system as you would if you were writing high fantasy. — Cassandra Clare

It sometimes seems to me like we're not supposed to notice that Shug's colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug's being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody's difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man's skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling. Daddy — Mary Karr