Joan Robinson Quotes

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

You know, nothing is ever happily-ever-after. Ever.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't heaven, so don't expect it to be.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

I don't think people should confuse fantasy and reality because no one is perfect - we all know that.

Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.

Thinking that everything is going to come together in a perfect way is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.

I assure you that the world is not so amusing as we imagined.

No," says Ariana. "It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that's all.

Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is. -Connor

It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.

It can't always be a honeymoon

Even when your dream that you set out comes true, it's not always perfect, and there isn't always the kiss at the end, and we all get to live happily ever after. That's not the reality of life.

Reality is always so obstructive.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a paradise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.

When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.

I’m a great believer in common sense, and the older I get I see that common sense is not that common

There is nothing perfect...only life.