Quotes About Expectations

Ma ho capito tardi da che parte bisognava andare: dalla parte dei desideri. Uno si aspetta che siano altre cose a salvare la gente: il dovere, l'onestà, essere buoni, essere giusti. No. Sono i desideri che salvano.

Poi non è che la vita vada come tu te la immagini. Fa la sua strada. E tu la tua. E non sono la stessa strada. Così … Io non è che volevo essere felice, questo no. Volevo… salvarmi, ecco: salvarmi. Ma ho capito tardi da che parte bisognava andare: dalla parte dei desideri. Uno si aspetta che siano altre cose a salvare la gente: il dovere, l'onestà, essere buoni, essere giusti. No. Sono i desideri che salvano. Sono l'unica cosa vera.

Everybody expected everything for nothing not realising that he had bills to pay.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was not a lazy man, but it was remarkable to reflect how most men imagined that things like tea and food would simply appear if they waited long enough. There would always be a woman in the background--a mother, a girlfriend, a wife--who would ensure that those needs would be met.

Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known

Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo , crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.

Women, as usual, were expected to behave better than men, and inevitably attracted criticism for doing things that men were licensed to do with impunity.

Dear friends, he began, there is no timetable for happiness; it moves, I think, according to rules of its own. When I was a boy I thought I'd be happy tomorrow, as a young man I thought it would be next week; last month I thought it would be never. Today, I know it is now.

So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.

That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.

She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.

It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better.

every wife [..] had a mental list of things that her husband should do but realistically never would do.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni warmed to the theme. "And you could have yet another list," he said. "Things that other people should do, but don't seem to be doing." Mma Ramotswe thought for a while. "That could be a very long list," she said. "There are many people who do not do what they should be doing.

We have always asked too much of women in this country. They hold up the sky on their shoulders.

He looked again at Angel. Her blonde hair, shoulder length, had been tied back with a red ribbon. A red ribbon stood for carnality—of course it did. And her blouse was tight—deliberately so. You don't wear clothes that are tight unless you want to get out of them at the first opportunity—everybody knew that. And her jeans were close-fitting, and even her shoes looked several sizes too small for the feet that were within.

Most of us are quite selfish when it comes to our children, you know. We want things from them: love, the satisfaction of seeing them do well, and so on. Plenty of parents don't think just of their child's best interest. Oh, they may pay lip service to it, but they really think of themselves, of what they get from parenting.

That was what the story of Goldilocks and the three bears was all about: breach of trust.

No, I mean it. People think that everybody has been involved with somebody else, whatever their nature. They find it inconceivable that one might go through life never finding anybody. But you know something, Caroline? I think that's far more common than you would ever imagine. There are plenty of people in that position.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

She knew that for many people this was their greatest ambition: to have a partner and a child, to live the domestic life, but she had never thought it would be enough for her. Yet it was.

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want.

But it had not occurred to him to praise her, because in his view she was just doing her duty as a woman and there was nothing special about that." (pg.34)