Marian McPartland Quotes

We have never enjoyed a piece of the great American dream.

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

I thought my high school would either be like 'Beverly Hills 90210' or 'Stand and Deliver' - it was just a run-of-the-mill high school.

For a while, I drank the juice - I did things the way everybody else said to. I listened to their advice. But it didn't work.

Because I'm married and like being at home, I'm labelled as a Stepford wife.

I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.

You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, 'Can't anybody here play this game?' There comes a time in every man's life and I've had plenty of them.

It was fashionable, youre supposed to be a married lady, so I did.

She hadn't slain the dragon. Not at all. She hoped no one ever would.

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

"Well, well!" said my aunt. "I only ask. I don't depreciate her. Poor little couple! And so you think you were formed for one another, and are to go through a party-supper-table kind of life, like two pretty pieces of confectionery, do you, Trot?"

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing, which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

My idealism has not abated, but I have witnessed it withering away nationwide, to the point where at least among the young, to have ideals is akin to being blinkered and oldfashioned.

The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become 'somebody,' and frankly, I don't have the least ambition to become anybody.

All romances end at marriage.

How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring?

There are a lot of so-called "good Americans" who are really a bunch of bums.

I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.

Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.

The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

I think I'm what they call a never-was.