Quotes About Expectations

That you get booed belongs to professional sports.

I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.

from St. Luke: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.

Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.

It has been eleven days, Stephen, eleven fucking days! Eleven! The presidency is supposed to age the president, not the public.

If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service.

At eight you're dead serious about what the world owes you: Civilization starts in your own room and moves out from there.

Benjamin had not dared, yet, to enquire about sales figures; as for the book's critical reception, it was non-existent. No reviews in either the national or local papers, of course, nothing on the various readers' websites and no reader reviews on Amazon - where it had a sales raking of 743,926 (or, if he wanted to cheer himself up, 493 in Bestsellers>Fiction>Literary Fiction>Autobiographical Fiction>Romance>Obsession).

In quanto a lei, sapeva anche di leggere più di quanto fosse sano, di riporre troppe aspettative nella lettura, di avere una sorta di ossessione nevrotica per la letteratura e i suoi presunti benefici sul piano morale.

My poverty was always a source of disappointment to her. If only she could have waited a few years

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.

People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.

Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one alternative sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?

Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be .