Quotes About Expectations

says people of all ages compare the amount of control they have in a relationship to only the amount of control they used to have—not to the amount they feel they should have. When more control is allotted with time, people are satisfied; when control is cut back, people are angry.

I just now know that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions.

Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become then what you are.

Grown-ups are always more fascinated by what you might become than by what you are.

Grownups are always more fascinated by what you might become than what you are.

When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder ... the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.

People, she sneered, were not meant to be as happy as you make them. … People were meant to be as happy as you make them.

I never considered disobeying an order or even a request from Daddy. I loved and admired him, and one of my preeminent goals in life was to earn his approbation. I learned to expect his criticisms, always constructive, but his accolades were rare. My

For marriage to work, couples need to share the same basic views and expectations, have similar value systems, and a compatible set of goals and desires for the future.

I often try to reassure myself by saying, "Well, at least it can't get any worse." But the truth is, it always can. And that's what really terrifies me.

Did you ever sit back and evaluate your life and think, "Boy, things are going just as I always wanted them to?" I didn't think so.

Katie shook her head in dismay. "I thought being poor was the worst thing that could happen to a girl." "No, Katie," the countess said in a clear voice. "The worst thing is to be in love with one man and have to marry another." —Katie O'Reilly to the Countess of Marbury

Gwen: It's not going to work. Paul: Pardon me? Gwen: Cinderella's not going to sleep with you because you're taking the ugly stepsister to the ball. She'll still make you wait.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.

Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I?

In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think of nothing to do but walk downtown, check out the Bon Marche for clothes she could not afford, buy a cracked crab for dinner and take a taxi home.

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the blessing aspect. We omit the instant of sudden chill, the what-if, the free fall into certain failure. What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.