Quotes About Expectations

We're so lucky, I said. Don't you think? Most people don't have that. I know, everywhere other than New York, if you have a good job and a spouse and kids and a house and a car, those are the markers of maturity and stability and completeness. And you eat your dinner at seven P.M. and go to bed at ten, and go for vigorous jogs on the weekend. If you're into that, great. But there are lots of other ways to put a life together.

But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.

the things that made me most myself were a romantic turnoff, that no one would simultaneously value my intellect and find me attractive; I had wanted so badly to be wrong, and I'd struggled to find evidence that I was.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Did he, in a way he was unable to articulate, actually like my strong will? Or did he mistake me for a typical woman, was he game to be my boyfriend not because I was Hillary and distinctly myself but because I possessed the standard feminine qualities that a college-educated man in the late 1960s might wish for? Did he not understand that I was special?

He didn't put it in these terms, and I'm not even sure if he knew this was what he was saying, but his message was: Act like a guy. It was a message that turned out to be invaluable.

So often, people let you down; so often, situations turn out disappointingly. But occasionally someone recognizes, acknowledges, your private and truest self.

now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you'd be a nuisance.

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.

There was a fantasy aspect to our time together that I don't think prepared us for some of the mundane daily struggles life has in store.

I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted. And, in fact, it was in falling short that I truly excelled.

My real frustration with Clara, I think, was that it seemed like she should be insecure but wasn't.

If Dad can't come and see me then why can't I go and see him?" he asked. What could I say? "I think he's very busy getting settled in America. I'm sure he'll be in touch soon." But as time passed with no word Julian drew his own conclusions. "Dad's always telling people to love each other," he said to me one day, "but how come he doesn't love me?

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

She did not at the bottom believe she ever would have him. She did not believe in herself primarily: doubted whether she could ever be what he would demand of her. Certainly she never saw herself living happily through a lifetime with him. She saw tragedy, sorrow, and sacrifice ahead.

Tão sensíveis que nós somos àquilo que se espera de nós.

they want to do the right thing. Just make sure they know you want them to do the right thing.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies-thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one's bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.

Men don't think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted.

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason.

They seemed so free, and were as a matter of fact so tangled and tied up, inside themselves. They seemed so dashing and unconventional, and were really so conventional, so, as it were, shut up indoors inside themselves. They looked like bold, tall young sloops, just slipping from the harbour, into the wide seas of life. And they were, as a matter of fact, two poor young rudderless lives, moving from one chain anchorage to another.

Why don't you praise me up to the skies? She laughed. I should have the trouble of dragging you down again, she said.