Quotes About Expectations

I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter—if she'd lived, as I'd grown older).

Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.

They did not set out to disappoint their father, not on purpose, but neither did they wish to shoulder the lumpy, enervating burden of the mundane.

Just because people are related to you doesn't mean you love them

What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!

On the way home from school we go to the record store... [Cordelia] expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we're supposed to be behaving, now that we're in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can't do them without feeling I'm acting.

It was always a cruelty to promise them equality," he said, "since by their nature they can never achieve it. We have already begun the merciful task of lowering their expectations.

He'd wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.

How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being?

I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere.

He got his driver's license, he got his high school diploma, he got his university degree. He got a worried little furrow between his eyes. He did what he thought was expected of him, and brought the official pieces of paper home to her like a cat bringing dead mice. Now it's as if he's given up because he doesn't know what else to bring; he's run out of ideas.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster." —GEORGE ELIOT, DANIEL DERONDA

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.

It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Because if you weren't an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn't have a baby?

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. Mary

To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What's he going to do next?

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.

But it will take a considerable amount of work. Women have been told for so long that they can achieve equality in the professional and public spheres. They will not welcome the…" I sought for a word. "The segregation." "It was always a cruelty to promise them equality," he said, "since by their nature they can never achieve it. We have already begun the merciful task of lowering their expectations.

She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.