Quotes About Expectations

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.

La verdad es que las fantasías, fantasías son y una no puede vivir extasiada todos los días del año. Incluso si das un portazo y te largas, incluso si jodes con todo el mundo a la vista, no te acercas más a la libertad necesariamente.

If I wrote that women could be unkind, I was considered a traitor -- as if it were not worse treachery to pretend that all women were kind.

Mothers and daughters -- it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters.

We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women. —D. H. Lawrence

All this mundane: merely the ordinary experience of my whiplash generation. Caught between our mothers (who stayed home) and the next generation (who took the right to achieve for granted), we suffered all the transitions of women's history inside our skulls. Whatever we did felt wrong. And whatever we did was fiercely criticized. That was the fate of our generation.

Si eres una hembra y tenías talento, la vida resultaba una trampa, no importaba el camino que eligieras. O te sumergías en la vida doméstica (y tenías fantasías a lo Walter Mitty para fugarte) o suspirabas por la vida doméstica en todo tu arte. Nunca podías escapar a la condición de hembra. El conflicto estaba escrito en tu mismísima sangre. Miedo a volar

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.

The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be.

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown.

I say I never wanna get married. I feel trapped with the idea of marriage. How can you really be with somebody forever? I'd get bored! As I get older, I don't settle. I'd rather tell somebody 'This is what I want - take it or leave it.'

Surely,' she said, much quieter, more reasonable, 'surely you've been with other women?' His glance at her was dry. 'What do you think?' She looked away at random. 'I think that it appears we have a double standard, here. Men can have sex, women can't. Who, then, do the men have sex with?

I should have been out there having a wild time like all the other girls my age, but I wasn't. I was going home every night to what was, initially, a very happy marriage.

The people you care about most, care the least for you. That is why I'm just a number to you even though you are my world.

One day you're young with all your fine plans for the future. The next you're in the future and it doesn't look at all the way you thought it would.

I have realized that I hate going to the premieres of the movies that I'm in. Because I feel this tension after the movie is over that everyone feels obligated to say something nice to you. It's so unnatural and uncomfortable.

Young women from a very young age are taught that life will be easier if you can just turn on the charming smile and say very little and be complacent and docile and sweet.

This world demands nothing short of perfection from women who aim high, and our need to see perfection in women has, until recently, far outweighed our need for their participation.

You have to kiss a lot of toads before you find a handsome prince.

Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?

Il s'en dégage un bonheur espiègle qu'on associe rarement aux ancêtres disparus. Ils recevaient de la vie moins que nous n'en recevons, mais ils en attendaient beaucoup moins aussi, et ils cherchaient moins que nous à régenter l'avenir. Nous sommes les générations arrogantes qui sont persuadées qu'un bonheur durable leur a été promis à la naissance - promis ? mais par qui donc ? »

Visiter les lieux de son enfance, c'est une pratique masochiste. On cherche à être déçu et, pas de surprise, on l'est.