Quotes About Expectations

Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.

Marriage is the classic betrayal

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

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 know have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

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 that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and 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.

Trabajo cincuenta horas semanales y reconozco que a veces no tengo tiempo para «ser todo lo que puedo ser»

When my father was told that I had been rejected from Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials. We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so.

It takes time to learn to live in the here and now. You have to hang on past the bad times, ... If you do hang on and do not run from your life you discover that you have more control of your thoughts and feelings, and your life, than you believed possible. You learn to quiet your frantic mind, to downgrade your expectations of things and people, find pleasure in solitude, and finally discover who you really are.

Within the first twenty years of our lives, before we are really adult, we make choices motivated by insecurity, fear, and other people's expectations; certinly not guided by clarity and wisdom. We plod along for years living with the wrong career or spousal choice, in a location we did not choose and perhaps do not like, and much more. One day we wake up restless and confused, and acknowledge that we have no agenda of our own, and that we have been living someone else's passion, their dream.

So, in the end, we were hypocrites for kindness. Both of us. Standing with my bouquet of orange blossoms, I thought: I'm happy but I'm in disguise. But probably many people feel that at their weddings.

Men succeed. Women get married. Men fail. Women get married. Men enter monasteries. Women get married. Men start wars. Women get married. Men stop them. Women get married.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Being mature isn't what it's cracked up to be.

I was surprised. It's not often that a woman receives an apology from a man, especially not in such circumstances. I am far more used to being told: You need to learn to take a joke, or; Why must you be so sensitive? Little girls are taught the lesson almost from the cradle. Boys will be boys. It's a man's world. It's because he likes you.

It turned out that my curiosity did not outweigh my courage after all. Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they're not what you hoped for.

Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they're not what you hoped for them.

Many people in the village wanted her to be more of a girl, and Peter had wanted her to be large and brave but a little less large and brave than him. But Pine Sap was sure enough to want her to be exactly who she was.

Peter loves to make promises. He has the best intentions of keeping them. It makes it worse, somehow, that he doesn't know how to. He thinks he's a nice boy, that's the worst part.

It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.

The bottom line is that we never fall for the person we're supposed to.