Realistic Quotes

“You can’t set fires, Anna. Never again. Promise.”
[Anna] aimed her defiance at Mary.
“And you? What’s your reason to hate me?”
Caroline spoke quietly. “We nearly died — in the fire in those mountains and at the house when Ravi had a gun pointed at us.” Her eyes were full of tears. “The fire you set at The Old Hospital could have killed me as well as Janet and Agnes.”
Anna muttered into the syrupy dregs of her tea. “Fire, you’re firing me?”
Mary grimaced. There had been too much fire.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“She stabbed the earth with her big fork as if she could make Cookie Mac’s blood sprout from it.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“If the Agency could become a container for something neither Anna nor Mary had known before: a family. Now, without Caroline depending on her, Anna was alone. It did not taste good. There were voices inside: I am risking everything; I could lose everything.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Mary’s hands clenched. She’d been through fire, what with a murder, and white supremacists. And what about Caroline, who had gone undercover to rescue the Scroll’s Key Keeper? Where were the College’s thanks for that?”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Do you know the song Violet Crowned Athens?” he asked. Yellow hair like hers was rare among the Greeks. Though some people say that Helen of Troy . . .”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“I haven’t got a clue why his bones disintegrated, but look at the bright side,” laughed Adam. “We won’t have to dispose of the body. I’ll get a pan and brush in a minute and flush him down the toilet.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“He desperately tried to think of a story to explain his involvement in her sudden appearance, without mentioning the book of magic in his possession.
 ”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“The reality is that the lives of the smallest patients are in our hands, and their clinical condition can change in an instant. No matter how many times you are involved in situations such as this, the physical stress and anxiety as well as the emotional and psychological effects of being immersed in that environment are dramatic and lasting on the human body, mind, and central nervous system. These effects are severe, and I firmly believe that they are cumulative over your lifetime.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“One of the greatest realizations that I clumsily stumbled upon during this process, was that these people didn’t need someone like me to tell them what to do; they needed someone like me to show them what can be done, together.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“The hypocrisy was too much to bear, the institution was paying over a million dollars for Mr. Hyde to perform “values training” to “protect our culture,” while they simultaneously paid $2 million a year for Dr. Porter to destroy it. It was a laughable facade, but instead I wanted to cry.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“You understand that you are being manipulated by others and you become overwhelmed by hospital bureaucracy. It feels as though you have been violated by administrators who have robbed you of your passion for helping children. That passion that drove you to become a healthcare provider is replaced with mistrust, negativity, and hopeless skepticism.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.”
― Orson Welles

“We do not create life, we create death.”
― Marie Symeou

“Miracles are statistical improbabilities.”
― Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff, Obsidio

“This is a love story. Twisted and messy. Flawed and screwed up. But it's ours. It's us. I don't know how our story will end. but I know it will start.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Retribution of Mara Dyer

“Pessimistic" is a word for "realistic" that optimists use to make themselves feel better (about their unrealisticness).”
― Claire

“Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).”
― Michael J Fox

“Moments from their life together flickered: their first time making love. Eating pizza on the floor of their city apartment. The way he gently laid his thumb to still her wildly twitching eye. Who was he now? Who was she? What was happening? … Yes, my partner is a thief. A thief in the night.”
― Amy L. Bernstein, The Potrero Complex

“Missing: A teenaged girl with lanky, blonde hair and a sunburst tattoo on her cheek. The holographic posters, brighter than day itself, lit up the air on every block of Main Street.”
― Amy L. Bernstein, The Potrero Complex

“Your car goes where your eyes go.

Lonliness is unable to survive without a willing host.”
― Garth Stein

“And it's beyond my energy to explain why I don't think that four-letter word that everyone's so obsessed over and that gets everyone into so much trouble and pretty much makes everyone behave like an ass can live in a place like this. Somewhere during dry cleaning, details, and missed meals, it flakes away and what you're left with is married people with a tolerable affinity for each other. That little four-letter word can exist only in poetry, or movies of 2 to 3 hours in length. Maybe in a mini-series.

This place of dull details and irksome obligations is a home only to other four-letter words, which are used much more frequently.”
― Kendare Blake, Sleepwalk Society

“Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the liquor weaker, the gods kinder, the dice hotter - it might have all ended up in a one-sentence story.”
― Mickey Rooney, Life Is Too Short

“What would it be like to exist in a world without suffering? To have no needs, only desires? To be surrounded by so much beauty that you forget how ugly life is for everyone else? Who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t be willing to fight for it? What the alumni did to get there – lie, cheat, steal, kill – I’m sure they’d all say it was worth it. And I bet they sleep soundly because they know that their nameless, faceless victims would have done the same thing.”
― Kirsten Miller, How to Lead a Life of Crime

“Life without any wonder left in it is flat and stale.”
― David Eddings, The Belgariad, Vol. 1: Pawn of Prophecy / Queen of Sorcery / Magician's Gambit

“I've always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best.”
― Hakeem Olajuwon

“This was the math she ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was always just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging her steps.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“To call yourself a “realistic” person is intensely arrogant and naïve.”
― Vizi Andrei