Quotes About Expectations

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. The habit fitted snugly into my well-established world of make-believe.

It's explained that all relationship require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope

As my friends became older, many of them married and moved out of Soho into the suburbs where their failure would be less apparent.

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

I blew that clay pigeon to smithereens. I don't know why Mum got so upset. According to Uncle Andrew she's a crack shot herself. But she says I'm too young. What I'd like to know is how old does a person have to be before they get to do all the fun stuff?

As soon as you declare it a test, your body is going to secrete adrenaline, because you will be saying to yourself, "Uh-oh. I'd better do well," while you simultaneously imagine yourself failing. That process will cause you to feel anxious. The more you set up future events as tests, the more you are going to feel anxious.

Like most women you are riddled with the missionary instinct, that always seeks to change a man's nature and make it a little higher than the angels; whereas a man knows he can't remake any woman, and if his wife doesn't suit him, he accepts her as she is or goes out and finds another.

She had found that her fellow students were friendliest when they were about to borrow money from her. In

Instead of seeing all of this as God's extraordinary grace, we come to expect the comfort and joys that God gives us as the baseline, the measure of what we believe to be our due. When our comfort level drops below our expectations, we are shocked and angered, and even foolishly express our outrage to God Himself.

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her, but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.

How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.

I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that's the case, why do Americans always behave as if they're victims? Hear

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that's the case, why do Americans always behave as if they're victims?

A man need not necessarily be ugly or poor to be cheated of his wife's love, but he is sure to lose it if he is too gentle.

often she has crippled her children's minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit them into her social forms;

It is because we have not learned to regard men and women normally, in their own proper places, that we have conjured up a cluster of poetic notions about them.

I don't think young men or women should feel pressured into marriage. You shouldn't marry anyone, in my opinion, who you have to try hard for.

I mean, like most guys, you carry around this girl in your head, who is exactly who you want her to be. The person you think you will love the most. And every girl you are with gets measured against this girl in your head.

Well sure, who doesn't need a boyfriend? but realistically, those exotic creatures are hard to come by. At least a quality one.

we've become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we've marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.

He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another's deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.