"Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily"
About this Quote
Coming from Radner, an actress and comedian whose work traded in buoyancy while her life ended painfully young, the subtext reads as hard-earned. Comedy is often sold as armor, but this sentence admits the opposite: the person making you laugh may be protecting something delicate. There’s also an implicit critique of the cultural machinery that feeds on aspiration. In show business especially, dreams are constantly passed around, revised, pitched, rejected, “workshopped” until the fiber weakens. Paper is also what scripts are printed on - an inside-baseball detail that gives the metaphor extra bite. Your dream can literally be a stack of pages, vulnerable to a single executive decision, a casting shift, an illness.
The intent isn’t to shame dreaming; it’s to warn against treating dreams as indestructible. Radner makes room for grief and realism without surrendering to cynicism. Paper tears, yes - but it can also be rewritten, recopied, taped back together. The line’s quiet power is that it lets both truths coexist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Radner, Gilda. (n.d.). Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-like-paper-they-tear-so-easily-148471/
Chicago Style
Radner, Gilda. "Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-like-paper-they-tear-so-easily-148471/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/dreams-are-like-paper-they-tear-so-easily-148471/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.










