Quotes About Expectations

Hers was the unconscious tyranny of inexorable great expectations.

She never slept very well because old people never do; especially when they have brought six children and eight grandchildren into a world that is not as good to them as they thought it was going to be.

Please, Mem, it is too hot. Can you make some now?" Anna smiled. She smoothed strands of sweat-dampened hair from the child's brow and said, "Oh, Fa-Ying! Just because your father can make it rain doesn't mean I can make it snow." "At last I discover her limitations." Anna whirled to find herself eye-to-eye with the King on his royal elephant. She bowed respectfully and adopted a more formal tone. "I have many, Your Majesty.

This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

You stay loyal to what increasingly disappoints you. It happens all the time.

Don't make promises you can't keep

Isn't that odd?' she continued as they wandered back from the front towards the shops again, 'When you see people in the shops choosing their clothes and shoes and stuff, they take ages - as though each thing they choose will be amazing and perfect. And then, look at them. They mostly look simply terrible - or just ordinary They might just as well have chosen their clothes out of a bran tub.

Nicht zu wissen, was ich genau will, heißt allerdings nicht, dass ich zu etwas Langweiligem gezwungen werden möchte, von dem alle denken, es wäre gut für mich. Damit meinen sie doch nur, dass es sicher und langweilig ist und nicht schlecht. Aber Sicherheit interessiert mich nicht.

I do not like the people who read fifteen books by a man who has written three worth reading.' 'But if one enjoys reading, one must be resigned to many disappointments.' 'Disappointments – certainly. But if you read a book and are disappointed, it is because you intended to be pleased.

Aber ich weiß, dass deine Maßstäbe unglaublich hoch sind. Ich glaube, die meisten Menschen könnten ihnen nicht genügen. Nicht ständig. Und genauso kann ich kritisch sein und dich trotzdem sehr gern haben. Ich kann nicht anders, als es zu bemerken, aber das ändert nichts an meinen wirklichen Gefühlen.

One wanted children; had them, and brought them up: and then, in spite of all the calculations of time and care, they defeated one by producing a result which seemed, to say the least, almost mathematically incorrect.

The fact that women tend to regard the most important decision of their lives as already made, once they have married, makes them readier than their husbands to settle down and sit still in the situations at which they have arrived. It contributes, that is, to the passivity which is so commonly taken as characteristic of women, and also to the conservatism expected of them.

Imogen," he said with forced patience, "you have plenty of occupations of your own, and you don't care to do the things that give a great deal of pleasure to me – when I have time to do them. You don't want to fish or shoot and you can't drive my car, which would be a help to me sometimes. Am I to understand that you object to my having the companionship of another woman who can do these things?

I wasn't aware that not disappointing you was an option, so I'm afraid I haven't taken any steps to avoid it.

Being true to that self involves sifting through the layers of bad advice and unreasonable expectations of others. It requires seeing through your own delusions of grandeur or your fear of failure or your impostor syndrome or your conviction that there is something uniquely and obviously screwed up about your particular self.

People who are placed on a pedestal are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off. —Roxane Gay

Single people eat sadly--they cobble together things left from shopping trips based on dreams of all the meals they'd fix for themselves, all the ways they'd treat themselves to something grand; those dreams, for me, died by the next day and, despite my best hopes, I wanted only canned hash and apples.

If you save yourself for marriage, and then you don't get married, then what you saved isn't worth anything. It's like Confederate money. You're bankrupt, you have nowhere to spend it." Caroline to Peggy

By clearly emphasizing all that was lacking in others, by mapping and raising to an art form the catalog of their flaws, Veblen's mother had inversely punched out a template for an ideal human being, and it was the unspoken assumption that Veblen would aspire to this template with all her might.

Part of her wanted to do all the normal bridely things and the other part wanted to embrace her disdain for everything of the sort.

These embedded differences were enough to wreck everything, but what eager young couple would ever believe it?

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them.

Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash...in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.

You don't need to live up to someone else's standards. If you live up to your own, you will do perfectly well.