Quotes About Expectations

However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.

Stringham said: 'If you're not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.

People can only be themselves,' she said. 'If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.' 'That is what I should like them to be.

To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.

He was a weedy-looking young man with straw-coloured hair and rather long legs, who had failed twice for the Foreign Office. He sometimes wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles to correct a slight squint, and through influence he had recently got a job in a museum. His father was a retired civil servant who lived in Essex, where he and his wife kept a chicken farm.

Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs.

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in your life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve. You need to set and live by these standards no matter what happens in your life.

If you've ever felt stress—and who hasn't?—chances are excellent that it's because you felt you just didn't have enough time to do what you wanted to at the level of quality to which you were committed.

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in your life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

It's fascinating and quite sad that we live in a time where the media is salivating to take down anyone considered to be "best in class." Culture seems to lift them onto a pedestal of perfection only to hope they come crashing down. Whether it's an athlete, a CEO, or a money manager, any false move or seemingly slight crack in the armor is exploited to the fullest. Stone them in the town square of television and the internet.

It is not realistic to finance a 30-year retirement with 30 years of work. You can't expect to put 10% of your income aside and then finance a retirement that's just as long.

In every area of life, you get what you tolerate. And it's time to raise the standard.

Insiders are not helpless, nor are you. In every area of life, you get what you tolerate. And it's time to raise the standard.

every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.

Lovers with all the glories and all the graces are supposed to be plentiful as blackberries by girls of nineteen, but have been proved to be rare hothouse fruits by girls of twenty-nine.

If I had a husband I should want a good one, a man with a head on his shoulders, and a heart. Even if I were young and good-looking, I doubt whether I could please myself. As it is I am likely to be taken bodily to heaven, as to become any man's wife.

She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.

Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint from Nature, how little that is heroic should he describe!

I don't know much about ladies' judgements," said the old man. "It does seem to me that when a lady makes a promise she ought to keep it." "According to that," said Kate, "if I were engaged to a man, and found that he was a murderer, I still ought to marry him.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

Nothing perhaps is so efficacious in preventing men from marrying as the tone in which married women speak of the struggles made in that direction by their unmarried friends.

Of course Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing-mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.

Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books? And yet it seems that mothers do so expect,—