Aspiration Gap Quotes

I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

Children in poverty aren't trying to get out of poverty; they're just trying to rip off a pair of Nikes. So we Indian people are a microcosm of what's happening in America. We are now consumers, and our culture has gone.

The noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality.

I persist on praising not the life I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling

I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.

Until women are as ambitious as men, they're not gong to achieve as much as men.

I'm never really sure what that word means, but however inaccurately I use it, 'classical' was always my ideal, as long as I can remember, and something of that has always stayed with me, to this day. Of course, there were difficulties, because in comparison to my ideal, I didn't even come close.

Some people appear to be more meager in talent than they are, just because the tasks they set themselves are always too great.

I don't think football is enough for me.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

The distance between where I am and where I want to be seems impossibly large.

Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.

But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.