“But I couldn't ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.”

“Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?”

“if you just go on dreaming then it stays a dream and becomes stale and dead. But first to dream and then to do isn't that the way to make a dream come true”

“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”

“A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives...”

“In a dream, in a fairytale, nothing has to be explained, everything happens of its own accord.”