Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

There is no magic person out there, no perfect human being out there waiting for you.

I think once you enter the dating world and you realise it's nothing like those Disney movies you watched when you were a little girl, you just become more guarded.

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

I don't think you should meet the people you most admire. I don't want reality to interfere with my image.

It's a mature thing to understand that your pictures of a lifetime together with someone were... well, the reality is not what we're taught.

I have somebody I admire and want to keep at a distance. I've had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times - it's Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders. I just am nuts about her, but I have no interest in meeting her because I just don't think she could live up to what she's been to me in my head.

You should never meet your heroes.

From my experience, not one in twenty marries the first love; we build statues of snow and weep to see them melt.

In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the pricesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.

Nobody gave me what I wanted for my birthday! Nobody! What sort of presents do you call these? New shoes, a green sweater and a bunch of stupid toys!" "What were you expecting?" "Real estate!

You see, Dash -- I was never the girl in your head. And you were never the boy in my head. I think we both knew that. It's only when we try to make the girl or boy in our head real that the true trouble comes. I did that with Carlos, and it was a bad failure. Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.

Even as she’d come to know the real Ralston—the Ralston who was not cut from heroic cloth—Callie had failed to see the truth. And, instead of seeing her own heartbreak coming, she had fallen in love, not with her fantasy, but with this new, flawed Ralston.

It's about how whenever I fall in love, I have these expectations of the experience being a perfect dream, which, of course, ruins it. I imagine cradling my lover's head in my lap in a cab in the middle of the night, and drinking champagne in an elegant hotel suite. But life's rarely like that, and I usually end up walking home by myself in the rain.

Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.

I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.

Even if you find him. Even if he didn’t leave you on purpose, he can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him into.

One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don't justify them, become bitter.

Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that.

The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.