Quotes About Expectations

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

For my fifty dollars, I want to leave the doctor's office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac, which is one of the few things I'm actually not.

Perhaps I worried that if I didn't wander off, my family would get on my nerves, or—far more likely—I would get on theirs, and that our week together wouldn't be as ideal as I'd told myself it would be.

She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncallused hands.

That," the chief counselor said, "is what happens to people who play around." If this was the punishment for a boy and a girl, I felt certain the penalty for two boys somehow involved barbed wire, a team of donkeys, and the nearest volcano.

There's an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: "Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape." Is there a richer or more complex story than that?

When we went to the beach as children, on or about the fourth day, our father would say, Wouldn't it be nice to buy a cottage down here? We'd get our hopes up and then he would bring practical concerns into it... But still, we wanted one desperately. I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and then it would be everyone's. As long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it.

For my fifty dollars, I want to leave the doctor's office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac

There's an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: "Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

I had no interest in football or basketball but had learned it was best to pretend otherwise. If a boy didn't care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, "Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds." You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn't like sports.

When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up.

maybe people gave God too many alls to juggle.

Es interesante aceptar sin traumas la idea de decepcionar a los demás, de no hacer lo que esperan de ti.

Como no tengo sueños no me doy de bruces con la realidad. Que funcione un semáforo ya me parece el colmo de los logros humanos

I see you're closer to on time than usual!

I do not tell you that those who turn to betrayal, to theft, to murder and treason, do so only because they are good men who have been led astray. I tell you only that all men begin as good men. What they are taught as children, what is expected of them as young men, is either the armor about that goodness or the flaw that allows evil in.

It's appealing to imagine that if we can just get that one thing in our life to work out-- [...] that everything will be solved, absolved, good to go for good. I slipped into that way of thinking way too often, I admitted to Missy, even though I knew that sometimes in life all of a sudden there you were--standing with your Technics turntables just across the Canadian border, and you're not a new you, you're just you, but in Canada.

While love is celebrated, we are assured that a satisfying sexual encounter does not require love. If the Shirelles tune were written today, the singer would likely have to lower the bar down to "Will You Respect Me Tomorrow"—if even that.

A girl named Brittany or Ashley would have fallen in love with the spandex costumes and the white skates of a figure skater, but when your name is Joanna and everyone calls you Jo, you grow up in Cleveland watching your older brother play hockey in the shadows of the steel mills and dream of the day when you can wear a jersey and carry a stick, waiting for your chance to slap that puck home.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

That's why I ca never be happy with simple, good people", she thought. "It isn't enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!

That's why I can never be happy with simple, good people", she thought. "It isn't enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!

Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.

The more you expect from life, the more your expectations will be fulfilled. By laughing, you do not use up your laughter, but increase your store of it. The more you love, the more you will be loved. The more you give, the more you will receive. Life proves that truth every hour, every day. And life continues to surprise.