Quotes About Expectations

Woman's life today is tending more and more toward ... 'Zerrissenheit'--torn to pieces-hood. She cannot live perpetually in 'Zerrissenheit.' She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.

Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want.

one shouldn't expect someone else to fill all the expectations in our lives, answer all the loneliness or the dreams, provide us with a social status, a roof over our heads, daily bread, clothes for our backs, and a purpose for living as well, not to mention laughter and hope and love, someone to justify our aspirations and decide our moral judgments.

She was highly intelligent, with a gift for logical thought which many people found disturbing—especially men, who did not expect it or like it in a woman.

Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Nearly all married women will tell you it is a blessed state, and you are to be pitied for not being in it. That is arrant nonsense. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.

How do you forgive someone for not being what you wanted them to be, or what you thought they were? Especially when they are not sorry—perhaps they don't even understand?" "Or again, perhaps they do?" Hester suggested. "And how do they forgive us for having expected too much of them, instead of looking to see what they really were, and loving that?

Would it always be like this? Endless days of needlework, painting, house chores and skills, teas, Papa and Dominic coming home? What did other people do? They married and raised children, ran houses. Of course the poor worked, and society went to parties, rode in the park or in coaches, and presumably had families as well?

no man liked an argumentative woman—

How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet.

One time Gifford had asked Mona: "What's the difference between men and women?" Mona had said: "Men don't know what can happen. They're happy. But women know everything that can happen. They worry all the time.

you think anything is possible. But that isn't so. The world closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you don't hope for other miracles.

The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

In the story of the prince and the frog, there's always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.

Ultimately they will all disappoint you.

Qué tendría que haber hecho Cristo para que lo siguiera como Mateo o Pedro? Vestirse bien, para empezar. Y tener una cabeza lujuriosa de abundante cabello rubio.

every social problem is observed in relation to 'norms' which in fact never existed, people

Men don't know what can happen. They're happy. But women know everything that can happen. They worry all the time.

You never, never ask a young man to take you anywhere, Molly. It's cheap. It sounds desperate. It sounds like you can't get a date any other way. With your height and those big breasts, you're always going to have to be careful not to look desperate. A real beauty can get away with it, maybe, but the rest of us ordinary girls have to be very, very careful not to look desperate.

It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern.

Emma took a step back, surveying her. "So you're going into society on Rohan's arm tonight. What will you wear?" "I hadn't thought about it," she lied, pushing her loose hair away from her face. "I must have something left from my season." "Jesus God," Emma muttered. "We've got our work cut out for us." And suddenly she raised her voice. "Girls! We have a project!

She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded—how empty-headed and superficial, as if she'd somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom. What on earth had happened to her?

She had tried her best to be a good mother---which to her meant a predictable mother. She had promised herself that her children would never have to worry what sort of mood she was in; they would never peek into her bedroom in the morning to see how their day was going to go. She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.

I'm worried if I come too close, they'll say I'm overstepping. They'll say I'm pushy, or … emotional, you know. But if I back off, they might think I don't care. I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day. There's this narrow little dividing line I somehow never located.

Why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?