Quotes About Aspiration

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she's become this ordinary sort of boring person...I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary.

Or maybe they don't even want babies, some of these women, and life opens out to them in an endless field of work. And once in a while the world responds in a big way, letting them in, giving them a key, a crown. It does happen, it does. But usually it doesn't.

To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

The world of law was filled with the fallen, but theater wasn't. No one ever "fell back" onto theater. You had to really, really want it.

Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet.

And you should try to do what you want. We should all try to do whatever we want in life. I mean, what is the point otherwise?

It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I'd tried.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

One day you'll want for nothing. You don't belong here. You are meant for something finer than this.

doesn't he come for us? Why does he want us to be poor?

For anyone who's ever thought of giving up the dream . . . don't. Keep dreaming.

Margaret expected her friends to "be capable of seeking something." She cared little what that something was, only that her friends "should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,—that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained.

As our options expand, so do our desires - and unmet desires in particular.

I'm psychology major who has no desire to work with people.

People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted;

Tolstoy said about Ivan Ilyich: "What he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it.

A bird without wings and a man without art are both condemned to wander in low places; they can never soar up to those unrivaled heights.

Anything which makes you feel tiny also motivates you to be big!

Boat is nothing without water and man without his dreams!

By the time the clever reaches the clouds, the genius is already on the stars.

Every unhappy genius dreams to be in the place of a happy fool.