Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'

A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.

My parents' story is a great example of the American dream. Their struggles, their hard work for a better family... it inspires - that no matter how bad it might seem, you can always move past that and better yourself.

I have that thing in my stomach where I just need to keep striving for things. In my mind, I want the fairy tale.

When I was a child, I saw in the news that a person from Belitung had done well in sports in Jakarta, and I just couldn't imagine that it was possible for someone from here to become famous, and it's still very isolated out here.

From being a little girl in the projects, going through all of the mess that I was going through, to ending up at the Inauguration for the first African-American president, I'm speechless right now because I never thought I'd - I never ever - I couldn't even see that far. Even when I ended up in the music business, I couldn't see that.

I expect if you are going to come out of the shadows, then you're going to want to have some type of hope in the future that you're going to improve your life and, yes, accomplish that American Dream.

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.

It has given me a global vantage point, being the daughter of immigrants from China, who had nothing when they came here. And now I am leading a company. It speaks to something deep in me, the concept that you don't have to start with anything.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else. And that proved to be true.

I think that what drives most of us as human beings is the want for something. You might have a hope, or a big dream, or a goal that you haven't yet achieved.

Barack Obama was not born into wealth or privilege, yet today his is president of these United States of America. Barack Obama has lived the American Dream. He has walked in our shoes.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

Everybody relates to having a dream.

If I didn't mould my reality then I'd still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare.

Walls have never stopped people from trying to better their lives.

The American Dream

America is another name for opportunity.

Dre's from Compton, I'm from Brooklyn, and we both wanted to make a better life for ourselves, right? And we both - somehow, we're both recording engineers, that's how we got our break.

I didn't have the courage to let myself think or dream of acting because I come from Luxembourg - it's a very small country, and I think it's a place you need to get away from to see how big the world is and what's possible.

If I wasn't from Philly, I couldn't promise you that I would have the same drive and the same ambition because, as a little kid, I always saw myself as making it out, and I would escape with television.