Quotes About Expectations

Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl's debut.

A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement.

It's enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We're all on the same team.

You never think your life will be that big.    Just

in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

It's hard, he told her, when everyone wants it so much but you're the one who has to do it.

Its not that they want her. It's just they have this feeling, and they're off, Billy, they're way off, but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she's more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precint house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs…

The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away.

guess you're right," the woman said. "You blame everything on that one person. You think if that one person is gone, everything will be perfect and good." She slid her sunglasses back on. "But in the end, that person is you.

Now here was beautiful, vibrant Goldie, saying that we would be the best of friends, and I was foolish enough to think it was what I wanted above all else.

There are no white knights, Soph. Not like in your stories. You have to see people for what they are, not what you want them to be.

To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women.

Sometimes," Joe said after a bit, "it's just easier to keep being what everyone expects you to be. Even if that's what you're not, anymore.

Feeling pressured into doing something I didn't want to do for people I didn't want to please.

And still, we said nothing, like we'd all been trained so well to do.

I want to tell you that you'll know love when it hits you, and it will all be great and you'll find that one person who makes your heart sing, the end, happily ever after. I want to do that for you, I really do. But I'm just not that person. I'm sorry.

It was a kiss perfect in length and pressure and emotion, but unlike in the movies it didn't make everything all better.

Sometimes love takes you by the hand and leads you to run through fields of flowers while butterflies weave you a dress out of rainbows. Other times, love takes you by the throat and chokes you until all you see is the bright, sharp trail of shooting stars right before everything turns to black. The problem is, you can never tell in advance which way the story ends, not until you're too far into it, and you have no choice but to keep turning the pages.

And yet I know I am too young, that we're too young, for me to live my life only as it relates to you. If you had asked me to marry you the night you first told me about your acceptance, I would have embraced Princeton as part of a larger plan that involved me. I probably would have reacted differently. I might even had said yes. Alas, you didn't ask me then. You made plans for your future without me in mind, And that's okay. But how can you now ask me to arrange my life around you?

What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You've got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you'll succeed. Guaranteed. Where's my syllabus to guide me through life?

Actually, how I am a defensive pessimist. I always assume the worst, so if the reality is even a wee bit better than my disaster scenario, it's a cause for celebration.

Those were the best times, when I was still all promise and potential. Because right now I'm definitely not the most important sixteen-year-old on the planet. Not even ish. I'm just another prebumped girl dangerously close to wasting her prime reproductivity.

Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.

But the closer I got to my own marriage and maternity, the more I felt like I was only as praiseworthy as my healthy womb. Why was I the only one who seemed to see it this way?