Quotes About Expectations

I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.

Lepota koju je ?erulova imala u glavi odmalena nije našla put, Grekova, i završila se cela na licu, na grudima, bedrima, dupetu, na mestima gde brzo prolazi i kao da nikada nije postojala." Elena Ferante, "Moja genijalna prijateljica

Hablar del matrimonio como de una solución la dejaba reducida a una mercancía a la que había que dar salida a cualquier precio.

No se imaginen cosas que no existen, que no van a acabar bien

n?u m?t ng??i có s? m?nh thì ?ó là ?àn ông, còn n?u m?t ng??i ch?u s? m?nh thì ?ó là ?àn bà.

then stay at home, paula, and become a housewife and help me with the housework and with the animals and wait upon your dada as i wait upon him and also wait upon your brother, when he comes from the wood, why should you be better off than me, I was never better off than my mother, who was a housewife, because in those days there weren't any sales assistants here yet, and my dada would have beaten me to death if there had been any.

People's fates are simplified by their names.

Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.

They didn't take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn't challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn't know how to do anything real. I didn't know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn't a self-improvement project.

I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.

At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

what was "Cinderella," if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?—

Why do you look like that? You should be happy. A lot of things can happen in an airplane, at night, thirty thousand feet above the ocean.

Hungarian men are very interesting. They know how to say what you want to hear. They are very clever. But they do not mean these words. Five or six months later, when it is enough, then they will say the really awful things." Those words, "when it is enough," stayed with me for a long time.

They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn't a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from "being" Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

Ask not the grass to give you green, and later walk all over it.

Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers. Why

No artist is ever happy with all the work they produce, so why should their critics be? Let artists be revered for their best works of art—even if it happens but once in a lifetime—and forget about the rest. All too often art is a wondrous accident, and it is folly to seek genius in its maker.

Parents—especially step-parents—are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.

To be normal', he said, 'is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.