John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.

I've got to be honest, with every job I do there's a part of me, that child in me, that goes, 'This is the one.' And it rarely actually is.

When I won the Super Bowl I thought I was going to be, like, extremely happy. But then I really just felt like, 'Well, this is it?' I felt like I got bamboozled.

I guess that I have nothing more to aspire for.

Hope is a dream deferred.

Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.

I'm a romantic and I kinda believed in this fairy tale. And in some ways I think that's always been to my advantage, because like if you can believe in something great, I feel like you can achieve something great.

It doesn't matter what you're chasing, when you get there you're gonna be like, "Oh, is this all? It kind of sucks."

My mother used to hope that I would rise up from my humble roots. Become someone sucessful, or even famous. I'm famous all right, but I don't think it's what she had in mind.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

Alas! Alas! Life is full of disappointments; as one reaches one ridge there is always another and a higher one beyond which blocks the view.

By the time we've made it, we've had it.

Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

'The bigtime for you is just around the corner.' They told me that first in 1952 - boy, it's been a long corner. If I don't hit the bigtime in the next 25 or 30 years, I'm gonna pack in the music business and become a full-time gigolo.

I was very excited about the idea that I could be an idealist, that I could be my age, the eager beaver who had hope in the justice system and the one who gets disappointed just like the audience.

My dream was to win an Academy Award. But my other dream was to win the Super Bowl, and there's a chance that might not happen, either.

I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.

Nominations come and go. It is not going to happen to you every year, and I am very well aware of that.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Hope is in some respects a thing more brilliant, more vivifying, than fruition. What we have looked forward to with eager and earnest aspiration is never in all respects equal to the picture we had formed of it. The very uncertainty enhances the enjoyment.

When I finally got there, to where I thought was the top, I wasn't doing what I was doing in the beginning. I was not happy.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

Nothing is worse than having your dreams come true.