Diane Ravitch Quotes

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.

It was taunted as reality. It was dangled as a carrot. In terms of people's hopes and dreams, to say that that is less of a reality than the daily grind they find themselves in is maybe not correct.

Nobody should pin their hopes on a miracle.

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

If it came true, it wasn't much of a dream.

Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

Nothing lives up to what you imagine. It changes, shifts, becomes something else.

Nothing that you want ever is what you think it is.

One is forever throwing away substance for shadows.

The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

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

There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

These are stories you hear... of people sitting in a mall and being spotted, and you think it will happen to you. And when you're fresh off the boat, and new in Bombay, you want those kind of things! They are magical fables. You want to, somewhere, be a part of it, something people will read about. But reality is different.

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

It was total naivety that got me to Hollywood. I thought it was going to happen straight away. I told myself 'give it 5 years, there's no way I'll be here after that if it doesn't happen'. Cut to ten years later!

California is a tragic country … like every Promised Land.

People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this sordid earth.

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.

I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.

You think you can do anything, and then you slowly learn how wrong you are.

Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism.

We have this idealized romanticism about how love might solve all of our problems, but then it doesn't.