Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.
To be a director, you have to think you're the best. Ever since I went to film school, I imagined that you have to think deep down that you want to be Martin Scorsese or you want to be P.T. Anderson. Like, am I as good as those guys? Absolutely not. I feel like I keep learning, and I feel like I keep getting better.
I have always had strong maternal instincts. Even when I was still a child I cut out pictures of prams from newspapers and imagined the feeling of pushing my own pram through fresh winter snow and seeing the wheels' tracks behind me in the snow.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.
I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.
To win Best Director at Sundance was beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. It's still an incredible feeling to know I won. But as happy as I am about winning, I also know many other women of color have directed amazing films over the years that were equally deserving and didn't win.
I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined.
I remember just lying in the grass, staring at the clouds, wondering where they drifted off to after they floated over Texas. I never would have imagined that one day I would follow one of those clouds and find myself in Hollywood.
I never imagined it wouldn't work out for me. I had that absolute certainty in myself that has seen me through, I think, and my parents were absolutely behind me all the way.
When I finally held the trophy, it was just how I imagined it would be.
I adapted an antiquated style and modernized it to something that was efficient. I didn't know anyone else in the world would be able to use it and I never imagined it would revolutionize the event.
I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.
It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.
I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring.
The design of those commissioners, frigates and warlike force is directed rather against Long Island and these your Honors' possessions, than to the imagined reform of New England.
Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.
I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.
Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.
There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.
I suppose after 'Four Weddings' I was very busy for a bit, and I imagined that was my career, but I never had that thing of, 'I'm burning to be an actor. If I don't act, I'm not alive.' I've never had that.
I am busier now than I ever imagined I would be, but I feel blessed in that I have found what I am supposed to be doing with my life. It's wonderful to tell stories and have people listen to them.
I'm trying everything. But voice work is the best thing you ever imagined. It's not about how you look, and you can go to work in your PJs.
Terrorism is in good part an effective government propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy.
We imagined that the mildness of our government and the wishes of the people were so correspondent that we were not as other nations, requiring brutal force to support the laws.
I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star. It defines life for me. It's all I've ever imagined for myself.
I always imagined that having a baby is something that I'm going to keep in a private place, but maybe my curse is that all I'm going to want to do is tell everybody about what my birth process was like and what my children's nightmares are.
Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.
Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.
There's such a feeling of satisfaction when something you imagined turned into something real.
Now, actors get so familiarized with Eastern Europe. I never imagined I'd get as familiar with Budapest and Prague and places like that in my life.
You remember Donnie Brasco? It's the most notorious undercover movie ever; it's so street and so real. If you ever imagined yourself doing cop work, you imagined yourself getting pushed to that limit - seeing the furthest you can push yourself while still upholding the law.
All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.
The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.