But he also allowed himself a nostalgic, and uncharacteristically personal, moment - noting that his foray into China was something of a bookend for a career that began with a college sophomore's quixotic dream.

The first is her criminal case: did she hatch the bizarre scheme to defraud the government in order to fund her quixotic dream of running a scholarly magazine?

Progress in establishing a local farmers' market, a quixotic dream of long standing that finally received start-up money from the State Legislature last year, is another.

So it is fitting that this piece of waterfront would attract people with big - or perhaps quixotic - dreams.

"The Czechs have a rich literary heritage," said Mr. Wechsler, 48, who gave up a law career in Boston to pursue his quixotic dream.

Dismantlement was never the goal; indeed, the quixotic dream of the meritocrats was to make the meritocracy ever more elaborate and all-encompassing by continually adding new and better tests and procedures, until finally perfection was achieved.

Pelfrey's much-anticipated season debut was only slightly better than the weather, but he kept the Mets in the game long enough to dash the Washington Nationals' quixotic dreams of winning a second consecutive game.

Laboulaye had the quixotic dream, in April of 1865, that, if government by the people was ever reëstablished in France, it might be nice for the two nations to build a statue to their shared ideals-maybe a female figure of freedom with a slave's broken shackles at her feet.

If this quixotic dream of education, restoration and renewal falls through, one suspects they will accept that, too.

Forget the full cut of von Stroheim's Greed, or Orson Welles's studio-thwarted The Other Side of the Wind, or Kubrick's Napoleon, a quixotic dream tragically abandoned after years of painstaking research.