Is it correct to say "I realized that you are truly lost." instead of "I realized that you were truly lost"?
Because realized is past tense, I'm not sure whether using "you are" instead of "you were" is appropriate. If I use "you are", someone can ask me, "how do you know that they are still lost". Right?
What I actually intend to mean is that "You are lost if you don't change."
Best Answer
Normally in English, the tense of an embedded clause takes that of the matrix clause:
This says nothing about whether you were lost earlier, or later, only that you were at the time I realised it.
If is often possible to use a different tense in the embedded clause, but this will have a specific meaning. So
is grammatical, but is unusual, as it is emphasising that your being lostness continues to now (and probably implies that it is for all time).