Quotes About Expectations

When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.

Women love me for the man I'm not.

If we are going to persuade victims to come forward, we must rethink how manhood and womanhood are defined and how both definitions create unrealistic and unsafe demands on our behavior, starting when we're children.

How can adults expect forgiveness of children?It is an adult emotion. It is not a child's natural instinct to make compromises on behalf of a parent.

How much can you give to him when you get so little in return? Eventually I fear you'll go dry and end up hating him.

Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you inferior if you don't have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

Women always seemed to bring the size they wished they were to the fitting room, rather than the size that would actually fit.

How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time.

As it was a small town and a bored town and a hopeful town, kids talked and rumors started.

There was something about a wedding. No matter how much you put into it, you could always put in more. There was always someone else you could call, some other question you could ask, something else you could buy. You could put every worry, every desire, every whim, every moment of your waking day into a wedding, and it was big enough to absorb them all.

The notorious after-date phone call. If a guy called within three days, he liked you. If he waited a week, that meant he didn't have any better options and was probably just trying to get lucky. If he didn't call at all, well, that-was obvious.

Pourquoi toutes les mères étaient-elles si impatientes que leurs filles aient un petit ami ? Comme si la vraie vie ne commençait qu'avec les garçons.

If you ran out of ways to please and you had no family money, you went to law school.

The idea of love was always easier than the practice of it.

Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I've never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who were having sex with the majority of the male population.

At the rate I'm growing, though, I probably won't have a chest until I'm, like, twenty-eight, and then there'll just be a measly two-year window of time in which to find and wear a bikini.)

Maybe being a "princess" isn't so great. Would you always wonder whether people liked you or whether they liked the things you could do for them.

When I was older, I could move to some place (like Australia or Kentucky) where the boys act more like human beings.

That's what happens when your parents want you to be a physicist.)

It hadn't really occurred to me that the Pike girls would be competing against each other. What if one of them did win the pageant? The other would lose not just to strangers or even friends, but to her own sister. How awful! On the other hand, I was beginning to think that there wasn't much chance that either girl would win, not with banana-peeling and rude Popeye songs.

Oh, that is pathetic," said Mallory to Jessi. "Look at them. They're going to think the only thing that matters in their lives is beauty and poise. They'll grow up believing they can only be pretty faces, not doctors or lawyers or authors." "I am so glad Becca has stage fright," said Jessi.

Something occurred to me then. It was all about the unfairness of the pageant. Mary Anne was absolutely right. Myriah really should have won, if this pageant was honestly based on people's talents and character, but it wasn't. I was glad that because Myriah had been given such a terrific prize, she wasn't disappointed about not winning the grand prize. But I was sorry that she had to settle (even happily) for second best.

But when Danielle thinks of the future, she thinks of fifth grade, maybe sixth grade. She wishes to be able to graduate from Stoneybrook Elementary. When Kendra thinks of the future, she thinks of college, of being an adult, of becoming a writer. Kendra has a future. Danielle has a future, too, of course, but hers is much more uncertain.