Idealized Reality Quotes

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.

Every time I close my eyes, it's like a dark paradise. No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.

Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.

People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.

When I was younger, watching movies, it felt like everything was glossy and beautiful, and I didn't really relate to it.

I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be.

Suburbia, to me, was the most fantastical, unusual place. I thought it was Disneyland.

I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.

Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world - a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

I always feel, I guess being a product of the movies of the 40s where movies were the greatest things and screens were big and palaces were palaces and stars were larger than life that reality was so much inferior to what we felt was conceivably possible from what we had seen in the movies.

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

I paint life as I would like it to be.

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.

At seventeen dreams DO satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you farther on.

Fantasy is like an idealized reality, and the core of fantasy is the one person can make a difference.