Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Webb

Dreams are usually sold as wild horses: beautiful, untamed, somehow more authentic if they bolt. Mary Webb flips that romance into something sterner and more practical. "Saddle your dreams before you ride em" doesn’t tell you to stop dreaming; it tells you to stop confusing yearning with direction.

The verb choice matters. To saddle is to prepare for friction: weight, distance, the possibility of being thrown. A saddle is also an instrument of control. Webb’s line implies that an unprepared dream doesn’t liberate you, it endangers you. The subtext is almost pastoral and quietly moral: ambition without equipment becomes spectacle, not progress. You don’t get credit for wanting a different life; you get results from building one.

Webb wrote as a novelist of rural England, attuned to how fantasy collides with constraint: poverty, class expectations, physical labor, weather. In that world, "saddling" isn’t metaphorical decoration; it’s a daily technology, the kind that separates wishful thinking from survivable action. The colloquial "em" keeps it from sounding like a sermon. It’s advice passed across a gate, not declared from a lectern.

The line’s intent is to discipline the dream without killing it. Make it carryable. Give it a plan, a price, a set of straps you can actually buckle. Otherwise the dream rides you.