Quotes About Expectations

The pursuit of fewer errors is sensible; the insistence on none at all, counterproductive.

Inner needs drive external accomplishments but can never be satisfied by those external accomplishments. Which is merely to say that, for some people, the inability to be satisfied is a chronic condition.

When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety.

Well, fathers and sons… one way or the other, they always disappoint each other.

There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered.

Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.

Because men's crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren't they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren't they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there's nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.

Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Girls like that idea, that little bit of possessiveness. They t'ink it means he only wants her, when o' course, it's the other way round. He only wants her available to him. He's still free to look at other girls...

Women, in his experience, often expected you to understand that it was a measure of how much they loved you that they tried their damnedest to change you.

In her experience, men like Geraint were astoundingly prone to believe that their scattergun sexual advances were appreciated and even reciprocated.

This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn't show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world.

Robin did not know why the announcement that Strike was off to meet Elin should lower her spirits.

men's crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren't they, Mr Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren't they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer,

All well bred persons lie—Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think… William Congreve, Love for Love Strike's

If you're going to treat me like some piece of special-occasion china that gets taken out when you don't think I'll get hurt, we're—we're doomed.

He loved his aunt, who'd raised him for significant chunks of his childhood, but extended periods in her company made him feel stifled and suffocated. Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out.

Life in squats with my mother hadn't really prepared me for what to expect from the aristocracy. On balance, I'd have to say people were a lot better behaved in the squats.

Women were so petty, mean, dirty and small. Sulky bitches, the lot of them, expecting men to keep them happy. Only when they lay dead and empty in front of you did they become purified, mysterious and even wonderful.

Men only give you what they give you...when they know they can't give you what you want.

Play the hand you have, Antonio, that's all anybody expects. And it's a pretty good hand." "I'm