Quotes About Expectations

David thought living in a house was very difficult. It was not the house itself--that was lovely to be in--but the people. What was so difficult about them was that they constantly seemed to expect him to say and do things he would never have though of, and what appeared sensible and natural to him seemed to surprise them...

Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.

Books allow readers to determine what they wish. People often aren't quite as forgiving if you don't read or see exactly what they wish you to.

Tight on goals, loose on means" is how U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has described his expectations of accountability systems, and that phrase aptly describes our aim for curriculum. When the means of learning are restrictive, the goals of learning get warped.18

School-age boys had begun to define their life aims in terms of the occupations, and the prestige of the occupations, that lay ahead. They were asking, 'What is my work to be?' while the girls were wondering, 'Who will my husband be?

Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.

God! I hate clever women!" She froze for an instant before the reply was on her lips. "I love clever men!" Her eyes raked him up and down. "It seems we are both to be disappointed.

She's one of these beautiful women who's just a nobody and a nothing, and when they make it big, they always fall apart. Money can't do anything for them. Fame only makes things worse.

I am dating, but it is hard to find someone quick enough and funny enough. I am quite demanding.

This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill. Wine and cake? Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? Where's the fruit juice? Peter Rabbit got camomile tea. But wine and cake it was.

If this is hell, then hell could not be much, neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

She wasn't sure she WANTED to live happily ever after.

she was one cocktail away from proving his mother right

The halls were empty. Charlotte had missed the first bell and would be late, again. Her homeroom teacher would ask her for an excuse and she would say, 'Overwhelming feeling of dread.' That was going to go over nicely.

Hazel understood. Being grown up meant doing what grown-ups wanted you to do. it meant sacrificing your imagination for rules. It meant sitting quietly in you chair while your best friend is helicoptered off for emergency eye surgery. It meant letting people say whatever they wanted to you.

Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren't even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.

Teachers loved to say people had potential; that's what teachers did to keep themselves from getting canned. What were they supposed to say- I'm sorry, your kid has no promise whatsoever? She's utterly mediocre in every way?

Oscar did not know what he was supposed to be feeling right now, what all the adults behind him would be expecting him to feel. He did not even know what he was, in fact, feeling. Except, whatever it was, it was a lot. Too much. More than bodies could hold.

Part of being grown up is acting the way you're supposed to act, even if you don't feel like it. Can you be grown up for me?

When girls set their sights on a career, they have to work it out of their systems. Otherwise the kitchen sink gets to be a kind of sacrificial altar.

Raised to be God-fearing, if not religious, both Violet and Faye came to think of all this - their lives as silent, fettered wives and mothers - as the trade-off for marrying well