Brian Aldiss Quotes

There's no limit to what you can dream. You expect the unexpected, you believe in magic, in fairy tales, and in possibilities. Then you grow older and that innocence is shattered and somewhere along the way the reality of life gets in the way and you're hit by the realization that you can't be all you wanted to be, you just might have to settle for a little bit less.

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

Far too many young people are living in their parents' basements, and I think it is important for people to have hope and a vision things can be different.

…what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.

When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives.

The world is divided between kids who grow up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting to be anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

Growing up, I fantasized about being a rock musician and that somehow it would be really easy. I didn't realize that it's so much work.

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

Most of us...are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations

I thought that the 40s was a tough decade, because it's when you finally figure out that you're not immortal, when you really start seeing that certain options are closed to you forever: You're not going to be a brain surgeon; you're not going to be a ballerina.

That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.

Don't get disillusioned, no don't expect too much Cause if what you have is all you can get Just keep on trying It just ain't happened yet.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

Until we Dream of Life and Life becomes a Dream.

When I was growing up and wanted to be a musician, the fantasy that I had of what the music industry was is so wrong.

The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert waste.

To young people the future is still long.

But ignorance is happiness,When young Hope is to show the way

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

Nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a tool and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Parents aren’t the people you come from. They’re the people you want to be, when you grow up.

It's not uncommon for young people to expect things. It's part of growing up.