Quotes about dreams and aspirations

We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across. (p90)

Parents dream of us leaving Makoko and doing better than they did for them- selves, and eventually we dream it too, all the while knowing it to be an elusive fantasy.

In Kabul, dreams were dangerous, for they gave us something to lose.

“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”

They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women.Very dangerous women who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, "brutal, senseless," etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.

To be one of those finalists on that floor is like... like being in a dream world in which accidents don't happen."

Sam: There's no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. That's what that moment is all about. To be one of those finalists on that dance floor is like... like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen.

Hally: Jesus, Sam! That's beautiful!

Willie: [Can endure waiting no longer.] I'm starting! [Willie dances while Sam talks.]

Sam: Of course it is. That's what I've been trying to say to you all afternoon. And it's beautiful because that is what we want life to be like. But instead, like you said, Hally, we're bumping into each other all the time. Look at the three of us this afternoon. I've bumped into Willie, the two of us have bumped into you, you've bumped into your mother, she bumping into your Dad... None of us knows the steps and there's no music playing. And it doesn't stop with us. The whole world is doing it all the time. Open a newspaper and what do you read? America has bumped into Russia, England is bumping into India, rich man bumps into poor man. Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right? ... Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it?

Hally: You've got a vision, Sam!

Sam: Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it. That's why there's only standing room left for the Centenery Hall in two weeks' time. For as long as the music lasts, we are going to see six couples get it right, the way we want life to be.

Hally: But is that the best we can do, Sam watch six finalists dreaming about the way it should be?

Sam: I don't know. But it starts with that. Without the dream we won't know what we're going for. And anyway I reckon there are a few people who have got past just dreaming about it and are trying for something real.

“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”

Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity.

In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster.

"I think if your dreams are small they can get lost, like trying to find a needle in a haystack...When a dream is big, you can see it better and hold on to it." (Ruthie)