Quotes About Aspiration

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. (…) I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams...Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming. -Doug Hansen

As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.

If the President's theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion," Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, "then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.

The better you did—the more contests you won—the greater the next goal, the greater the next mission.

Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.

Impossibility is attractive.

La gente è venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o libertà. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora più rabbiosamente alle tue libertà.

And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.

He'd come to Los Angeles to break into the movies as a writer. His soul was still alive then, but he'd met a girl who had dreams of her own, and one thing led to another, and now he was just another member of the goddamned middle class, suckering people for living.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

Well, just remember," Gary said, "there's more to life than cooking. You're at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you're going to get it.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

All Thinking is Wishful.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

My friends are appeased to stay in Odessa for their entire lives. They are appeased to age like their parents, and become parents like their parents. They do not desire anything more than everything they have known. OK, but this is not for me, and it will not be for Little Igor.

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy.

It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Julia Bloch: 43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.