Quotes About Expectations

I went into a Beverly Hills shop to buy an attache case. They had 250 cases on their shelves. I asked an attractive saleswoman if they carried one made of belting leather. She said 'no.' That was the end of the conversation. She made no attempt to show me another case that would provide equal service. I didn't buy an attache case.

Gods often contradict our fondest expectations. What we anticipate does not come to pass. What we don't expect some god finds a way to make it happen. So with this story

Indeed it is not usual for the young to grieve.

Was my life going to go on like this forever, totally uneventful? Alternating between unfulfilled expectations and expected disappointments?

Our relationship had been intended as an interlude. And it had become an interlude. My expectations had been fulfilled. Anyone who expected anything more would have been wallowing in illusions.

one of the sisters started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.

Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.

I cruised into this war thinking my buddy's going to take a bullet, and I'm going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm's way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad's car.

Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.

It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

Presently [Bridey] said: "If I was Rex"—his mind seemed full of such suppositions: "If I was Archbishop of Westminster," "If I was head of the Great Western Railway," "If I was an actress," as though it were a mere trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any morning to find the matter adjusted—"if I was Rex I should want to live in my constituency.

Ned, he said, there is one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.

There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.

That's the public school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.

I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Rosalind: Cecelia, darling, you don't know what a trial it is to be like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the phone every day for a week.

I wouldn't ask too much of her, I ventured. You can't repeat the past. Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!

You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty?one that everything afterward savors of anti?climax.

It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.