Famous Quotes & Sayings

J. G. Ballard

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century-sex and paranoia.

J. G. Ballard

The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.

J. G. Ballard

Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.

J. G. Ballard

The suburbs dream of violence.

J. G. Ballard

Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.

J. G. Ballard

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

J. D. Salinger

You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. 'Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream.' Nicholson nodded. 'What's the point exactly?' The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself.

Ivor Novello

I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.

Israel Horovitz

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.

Israel Broussard

I wanted to be a musician, either a guitarist or a drummer. I guess my dreams were in the entertainment industry, and I landed somewhere along there.

Isobelle Carmody

The very shape of our dreams defines us. We learn about the world and try out our thoughts and visions in them. Our dreams goad us and drive us and summon and sustain us and when we are old they comfort us. Magic is a kind of dream, and love is a dream, and hope is a dream. Without our dreams, there is no sweetness, no purpose to life.

Italo Calvino

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Italo Calvino

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe... and one I wholeheartedly respect.)

Italo Calvino

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Italo Calvino

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Isabella Bird

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.

Isabella Bird

I have just dropped into the very place I have been seeking, but in everything it exceeds all my dreams.

Isabella Rossellini

I believe in a set of values I cannot live by. I set high goals for myself, I seek perfection, dream of exotic faraway places. But ultimately, what I long for isn't far away at all. It's in my own backyard. Imperfection charms me, familiar things move me... a celebration of what we have, instead of what we long for. That for me, is glamor.

Isadora Duncan

Memories are less tangible than dreams.

Irving Penn

I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

No matter where you are from, no matter what your background is, no matter what your socioeconomic status is, every person can achieve his or her dreams.

Jack McDevitt

What would happen is that people like Geroge and Alyx would grow old and die chasing a dream. Although there were probably worse things to do with one's life.

Jack Ma

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

Jack Ma

No matter how tough the chase is, you should always have the dream you saw on the first day. It'll keep you motivated and rescue you (from any weak thoughts).

Jack London

The man, with his brain, can pierce the intoxicating mirage of things and contemplate a frozen universe in the most perfect indifference to him and his dreams.

Jack London

But, – and there it is, – we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.

Jack London

The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalized, organic.

Jack Kemp

There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.

Jack Johnson

His dreams are like commercials.

Jack Johnson

She barely understands her dreams of belly button rings and other kind of things. Symbolic of change, but the thing that is strange, it that the changes occur, and now she's just a part of the herd.

Jack Kerouac

You don't know what to say to me because the kingdom is within...flesh and blood's dream...so you fly now, pay later, all of us...I mean actually it's PAY NOW, FLY LATER

Jack Kerouac

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

Jack Kerouac

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.