Quotes About Real Life Heroes

“The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature.”

— Ferdinand Cohn

“We're not going to make it, I said.
The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me.”

— Brian Keene

“Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.”

— Darren Shan

“The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.
In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones.
Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.
I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.”

— Darren Shan

“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

“He needed time to adjust to real life, where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents, where there were no last minute reversals of fortune.”

— Laila Lalami

“Real life isn't made up of heroes and villains. Just ordinary people making choices they have to live with.”

— Kat Kruger

“This was the book I read over and over. I really felt so in tune with them- I knew all the dates of their lives, what they had been doing, whre they had been. They were always my heroes, creating something fantastic against all odds, and against their real life.”

— Christian Tetzlaff

“Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.”

— Michael Moorcock

“Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is the
resultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and these
you must study, each by itself, if you would create a living
character. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleeting
thoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.”

— Jules Verne

“If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren't bad people. They all have their justifications.”

— Lennie James

“We players are as normal human beings as anyone else, and we also have the right to live a normal life. I don't understand why people talk so much about the way we dress up, how we walk, what we eat, and every little detail of ours. Players are the real heroes. Sports have both respect and fame, and I am fortunate enough to be a sportsperson.”

— Sania Mirza

“In fiction, as in real life, love might inspire acts that are at best foolish and at worst life-threatening, but in the best romances, love is the final, secret ingredient that turns mere mortals into heroes and heroines.”

— Sarah MacLean

“Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.”

— Bobby Farrelly

“In my stories, I controlled what happened in a way I couldn't in real life. My characters lived through the horror and degradation of the cruelty of others and they not only survived, they thrived. They gave me hope and laughter, and they kept me going in spite of everything else. They were my heroes.”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.”

— John Rhys-Davies

“Literature throws us many great heroes. Real life invariably outdoes them.”

— Wilbur Smith

“I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life”

— Gustave Flaubert

“I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can't be wrapped up with a nice little bow”

— Simone Elkeles

“Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men. This observation insults Amelia because it implies that she only reads books with classically romantic heroes. She does not mind the occasional novel with a romantic hero but her reading taste are far more varied than that. Furthermore, she adores Humbert Humbert as a character while accepting the fact that she wouldn't really want him for a life partner, a boyfriend, or even a casual acquaintance. She feels the same way about Holden Caulfield, and Misters Rochester and Darcy.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

“It's a movie, OK? I went to see GONE WITH THE WIND, but did I really believe there was a guy named Rhett Butler who said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"? No. Movies need heroes and villains, and real life doesn't usually have heroes and villains. Real life has a lot of shades of gray, and moves have black and white even when they're in color.”

— Don Hewitt

“I went in and said, "If I see one more gratuitous shot of a woman's body, I'm quitting ... " I think the show should be emotional story lines, morals, real- life heroes. And that's what we're doing”

— David Hasselhoff

“Aside from comic book heroes, the only real life heroes I had were musicians.”

— Andy Biersack

“As a guy develops and practices his masculinity, he is accompanied by an invisible male chorus of all the other guys, who hiss orcheer as he attempts to approximate the masculine ideal, who push him to sacrifice more of his humanity for the sake of his masculinity, and who ridicule him when he holds back. The chorus is made up of all the guy's comrades and rivals, his buddies and bosses, his male ancestors and his male cultural heroes
and above all, his father, who may have been a real person in his life, or may have existed only as the myth of the man who got away.”

— Frank Pittman

“I find actors who play nasty guys in movies are the nicest guys in real life, and the opposite then goes for heroes.”

— Jonathan Rhys Meyers