Success Quote by George A. Moore

A dare disguised as a shrug: if the world has the power to crush our fantasies, why are fantasies expected to stay politely decorative? Moore flips the usual hierarchy in one clean inversion, turning “dream” from private consolation into a rival force. The line works because it smuggles aggression into something we treat as airy and harmless. It’s not asking for escapism; it’s asking for leverage.

As a late-19th/early-20th-century novelist, Moore was writing amid realism’s rise and modernity’s churn, when “reality” started to mean systems: class, church, empire, money, respectability. Realism claimed authority by insisting on hard facts and social consequences. Moore’s provocation needles that authority. If the real is so dominant, so confident, it can afford to be challenged by the unreal. The dream becomes an instrument: art, desire, ideology, even self-invention.

The subtext is that “reality” is never neutral; it’s enforced. It destroys dreams through shame, law, habit, and scarcity, then calls the aftermath maturity. Moore’s question refuses that moral framing. It suggests the dream can strike back by reordering what counts as possible: a novel remaking a reader’s sense of a life, a political vision prying open a closed society, a personal obsession breaking a script you were handed.

There’s cynicism tucked inside the romance. Dreams can “destroy” reality in ugly ways too: fanaticism, delusion, aestheticism that burns down responsibility. Moore’s line courts that risk on purpose. It insists that imagination isn’t just refuge; it’s a contender.