Quotes About Expectations

Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she's become this ordinary sort of boring person...I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

They should hand out vibrators if they're going to demand so much of you that you can't find time for a private life.

I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything," I say in a burst. "But you're supposed to act like it's not.

Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage." Neither

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn't exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood?

Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, "But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.

Why are we so hard on ourselves?" Asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it's not that I'm so hard on myself exactly, it's that I've learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.

The Ishtar of cartoons," wrote the Reporter. Every failure was the Ishtar of something

Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance.

Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

happen. And you don't always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.

She saw, briefly, the way the world rarely stopped to salute you or admonish you, regardless of what you had or had not accomplished.

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

It seemed so unlikely, but then again, so did many things in life.

When you have a child, it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child get pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit.

Married life proved not very different from premarried life, except now there was the desire for solidity instead of expansion.

But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed, for her.

How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself

to own only a little talent . . . was an awful, plaguing thing . . . being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time.

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary

Everybody's grown-up, everybody's old, and the normal rules do apply.