Idealized Life Quotes

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

The state of New Jersey is really two places - terrible cities and wonderful suburbs. I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. It's very romantic in that way, but a bit naive. I like to play with that in my work.

Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that.

There was a time in my early 20s when I would leave a movie theater and just feel so alone and lonely afterwards. I just felt like my life was nothing like those characters up on the screen, so perfect all the time. Why didn't I talk like that? Why don't I look like that?

It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear.

My whole childhood, I'd been dreaming of this two-point-four children, living in the country - everything was just going to fall into place, and I'd be this perfect mum. And it didn't happen. I was very shocked and disappointed.

I'm kind of jealous of the life I'm supposedly leading.

If everybody lived as I do, surely the writing of romance novels would never have come into being.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

TV is the best. I wish that's how life was.

Every girl pretends she is a princess at one point, no matter how little her life is like that.

There are conservative values where certain lifestyles are imposed and everybody should have 2.4 children and a dog and a cat and a house and you should feel like God and you should believe in God and you should be a capitalist. I don't buy any of that.

It's the relationships between people that are more important than the sort of far away fantasies of what the good life is, the world of supermodels and Bud ads.

I don't get people who want to live in a showroom.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

As a little girl, my dollhouse allowed me to imagine a big, perfect, grown-up life in which I'd be effortlessly domestic.

When we're young we have a very clear vision of how life is supposed to be, and it all seems very neatly packaged.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

When I see somebody sun-drenched in a shot with their espadrilles and a cup of coffee, I'm like, "Your life is amazing. It's so perfect." I get drawn into that very easily so it totally worked, because the visual style sucks you in. It makes you want that.

Like you see in the fairy tales, that's how it planned out in my head. Kids, little white picket fence, the American dream.

My fantasy life was very full. Certainly when I was a kid, I probably wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be a princess, or something magical, and get to dress up magically, and have the kind of life that I hadn't been born into, with magic powers or whatever, and live this wonderful idealised life.

The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.