Quotes About Expectations

Something like 'Without a Paddle' does really well at the box office and I'm like, 'Oh, here we go.' In 'Without a Paddle' I'm the romantic lead - great! A comedy and that's what America wants. Then it did nothing for me and I went into kind-of a work abyss. I just didn't get another shot.

Married silence is a specific kind of silence, typically one in which the woman goes mute while the man pretends as if it's perfectly normal that she hasn't spoken in hours.

Daughters," he says. "You raise them and watch them grow up, and you love them so much it makes you crazy. Then one day some guy shows up. Maybe he's nice. Maybe he's got a good job. Maybe he's got his shirt tucked in and he calls you sir. But he's never quite what you're hoping for. If you have one someday—a daughter, I mean—you'll know what I'm talking about.

I used to be a real prince charming if I went on a date with a girl. But then I'd get to where I was likely to have a stroke from the stress of keeping up my act. I've since learned the key to a good date is to pay attention on her.

There are few things more nerve-racking than trying to act normal with a camera in your face and someone shouting at you to "act normal.

Murakami played with the formulas of mass literature—what is elsewhere termed formulaic fiction—but at the last minute subverted the expectations of those formulas and left the reader wondering what had just happened. This to some degree accounted for the peculiar sense of simultaneous thrill and discouragement one often felt at the end of some of these texts.

She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.

The demand for likability is dangerous. It's a conversation stopper, and we need conversations, in so-called real life and in fiction.

When there are boys you have to worry about how you look, and whether they like you, and why they like another girl better, and whether they're going to ask you to something or other. It's a strain.

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you're little, it's all so plain. It's all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it's going to go. But things happen...

I'm not the white-picket-fence kind of guy. So don't go building castles in the air. You'll get trapped in the rubble when they collapse.

Why does no one tell you that work, not love, is the real salvation? Because if we told young people how life really was, they would beat us with their fists and ask why we brought them into this world. [Édouard Manet]

You have to take things as they are, not how you hear they're supposed to be.

This stage involves clear choices and sacrifices that to anyone with a patriarchal focus may look like dropping out.

Since time immemorial any woman with half a brain has known that in the pursuit of romance she must hide it

And – yes – it is a truth universally acknowledged that if an unexceptional man declares himself to a woman of his fancy, she will immediately start to look on him in a more favourable light and find his unexceptional qualities less of a handicap.

Men were like cars – they were absolutely lovely until they went wrong.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don't want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn't always fun, you can't always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don't remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you've no feeling.

For a girl, the wedding is when you're married. For a guy, it's when you get engaged. It takes a real aggressive human being to back out between the ring and the wedding.

Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: 'People like you', he said to me, 'are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.

Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't Heaven, so don't expect it to be.

First love is first love, first marriage is first marriage, disappointment is disappointment.