Quotes About Expectations

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.

In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want?

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

I'm ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgements, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.

No. It's the newly conscious young I mean, the ones with ambition and fresh diffidence, those who've learned the hard way that reach exceeds grasp nine times out of ten. How disappointed they are! And if and when they succeed for the first time, how anxious it makes them! They develop insomnia, or claustrophobia, or bulimia, or fear of heights. Now they will have to live up to themselves. Bummer.

the wife was as old as her own mother, almost, and women like that did not really have lives.

We miss you, Mom, though you were reviled to great profit in magazines and books for ruining your children – that would be us – by not loving them enough, by loving them too much, by wanting too much love from them, by some failure of love –

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It's nature's way. It's God's device. It's the way things are.

These kids could hardly burp without some adult pointing a camera at them and telling them to do it again—as if they lived their lives twice, once in reality and the second time for the photo.

It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

Joy is irrational and takes hard work and does not always deliver a happily ever after.

For a man, however, it was the opposite. Alexander's beauty was not felt to detract from his generalship. Nowhere was it hinted that a handsome man could not be a good ruler, or clever, or strong, or brave. In fact, people longed for a resplendent king. But for a woman…I shook my head. It was as if beauty in a woman rendered all other traits suspect.

Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further.

The usual masculine dissillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain

The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely on her shoulders now. She was twenty-five and looked it, and so there as no longer any need to try to be attractive.

Don't you suppose men get surprised after they're married to find that their wives do have sense? Well, it's too late den. Dey's already mahied.

Well, none of us, as far as I can see, are doing what we intended to do right now, but I think we'll make out just the same. It's a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn't precisely what they expected it to be.

He wasn't a gentleman and there was no telling what men would do when they weren't gentlemen. There was no standard to judge them by.

All you have done is to be different from other women and you have made a little success of it. This is unforgivable sin in any society. The mere fact that you have succeed to run the mill is an insult to everyman who hasn't succeed.

In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.

It's a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn't precisely what they expected it to be.

Why, my goodness, honey. After looking at all those pictures of seraphic and perspirationless babes for so long in the privacy of a foxhole, what is a poor doughfoot going to do when he comes home and discovers that American women are, after all, biological and given, under stress, to shiny noses?