Quotes About Expectations

When Lindsey and I played Barbies Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone's life we have no concept of compromise or retries.

They kissed. They wanted to do more but couldn't. Samuel wanted it to be special. He was aware that it should be perfect. Lindsey just wanted to get it over with. Have it behind her so she could achieve adulthood—transcend the place and the time. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport. You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

I love children say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don't love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raise as to ast 'em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

Why are women so easily tramps and traitors when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this?

Why aren't you happy in America, if everyone there drives motorcars?

Although I'm good at enumerating my father's flaws, it's hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he's dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers.

I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].

There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.

Only during courtship might a woman briefly gain the upper hand, as both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour did, but woe betide her if she did not quickly learn to conform once the wedding-ring was on her finger. The

Men, however, were encouraged to sow their wild oats, but a woman who did so became a social outcast and ruined her chances of making a good marriage.

The band had to stay in outhouses with stone floors," Jo Jo complained. "We got the impression they had only ever been used for animals. True, they had been swept out, but I was most unhappy. . . . We had an old-fashioned bathtub, and we had to fill it with hot water from pots and pans. [Even though] I was eight months pregnant, I was never offered a wash or a bath in Paul and Linda's place.

Sex is the price women pay for marriage. Marriage is the price men pay for sex.

Labels can also create self-fulfilling prophecies. If you are told you are sick, you feel and act sick, and others treat you as if you are sick.

It should be understood that doctors did not want to damage their patients—as a profession they were sworn to do no harm—but if they committed dastardly acts, they were more easily pardoned if something positive had come of the exercise. Experiments on humans were usually excused if the results of the study were substantial, the process had an element of science to it, and the physicians were correct in their expectations. 19

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

Promises didn't mean much...Anything could happen when all was said and done.

There are some men who will always prefer to deal with another man, any man, rather than a woman ... I can see him struggling to place me: I'm not married to him, clearly I'm not his mother, I didn't go to school with his sister and I'm sure as hell not going to go to bed with him. So what, he must be asking himself as he chews on his pigeon, is this girl doing here? What is she for?

Should I text him? What is the optimum amount of time to leave before texting him back? As if love were an algorithm. Will he hate me if we don't shag on the first date? Thirty years ago, the question was, Will he think I'm a slut if I have sex with him too soon? Honestly, I'm struggling to see this as progress. The pursuit of love is exhausting and most ridiculous.

Can you be a success as a mother? People only notice when you're not doing it right.

nothing ever happens quickly (except when it does). Nothing is ever, ever easy (except when it is). And, most of all, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan (except in the movies).

Later, she would question what life might have been like with someone who saw her as more than a gleaming trophy—a prize who began to lose her luster the moment she was won.

Salvatore had always thought that if he lived his life correctly, happiness would come. And maybe that was where he'd fucked up. He'd spent his life scared that he'd take a step wrong. Now he saw: the happiness was the barreling forward