Quotes About Expectations

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.

Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any more.

We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes what they want is to see you fall.

but you want faithfulness without love from the woman and giving of herself without pleasure Ã¢â'¬â€œ so who is the cruel one Ã¢â'¬â€œ the man or the woman? In the north you take love too seriously. You speak of duty, where you should only talk of satisfaction.

So I shall be honest Ã¢â'¬â€œ I don't think that I can love a man for longer than…" She mused as she leant her head charmingly to the side and considered. "One year?" I suggested. "What are you thinking of? Ã¢â'¬â€œ perhaps one month" "Even for me?" "No, for you… perhaps two." "Two months!" I gasped. "Two months is quite long

Whenever the women would talk about their daughters or other girls, about their future or their material prospects, the only thing they'd think of was marriage, the same way people talk about a man's job or office.

We are faithful as long as we love, but you demand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving of herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man? You of the North in general take love too soberly and seriously. You talk of duties where there should be only a question of pleasure.

Intercourse was now forbidden to everyone but married people; bundling disappeared. In its place young courting couples engaged in "petting"--which, interpreted broadly, meant that they were could do anything sexual short of intercourse. Women were now held responsible for controlling men's beastly sexuality--halting them from simply plunging ahead--at the same time that they were expected to be sexually innocent: an impossible position.

The "bad slut" is the girl or woman who exposes the effort behind being hot.

White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.11 According

And yet he forced himself to confront hard truths. Perhaps it was not "them"—the jealous critics and the fickle readers—in whom the fault lay. Perhaps he had let his disappointment with America in particular and with human nature in general overwhelm his powers of storytelling and characterization in his recent work—perhaps he had simply taken it for granted that an adoring public would sit still for whatever he offered it.

But very good isn't always good enough, Miss Flynn.

To idealize someone is also, in a way, to dehumanize them,

Then there was the issue of what the child would call us. ... I was told that no matter what I decreed, the baby would call me whatever she called me. I thought that was nonsense.

The middle of life has these cul-de-sac days. In your twenties you think, Surely I am going somewhere, and later--as in now--you think, Nope.

I had been at the center of her world; she had become my whole world. As my universe shrank, I needed her to be everything for me, and in return I longed to be everything she needed. Neither of us could live up to the expectations.

Some people are too good at trying too hard to be too happy.

In some marriages, trying harder does not engender a reciprocal response. It has the opposite effect. It feeds the fantasy that the sole purpose of your life is to serve your husband, make him happy, and meet his every need. It feeds his belief of entitlement and his selfishness, and it solidifies his self-deception that it is indeed all about him.

How much we get done and how well we can do it are the benchmarks of a good day or professional success. The more efficiently we produce, the better we feel. The downside, however, is that continued good feelings depend on keeping up the momentum of doing more. This doesn't come without a cost.

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

When he graduated he'd thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero's journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn't how it worked.