Quotes About Expectations

What must it be like to be the son of someone for whom you can never be good enough?

I wanted what she [her mother] had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safely and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.

But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.

I asked if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.

chest—I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he'd done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind. What

From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then - abruptly, horrifyingly - it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon!

Jesus," said my father, when I called to tell him I'd been hired to write for The New Yorker. "Well, nowhere to go but down.

Life, weddings, relationships, road trips, gardening, making out, haircuts: few of the fun things in life always go as expected.

Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on

The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.

the parrots were annoyingly arrogant. You could buy the most beautiful one in town, she observed, but that wouldn't make it love you. You could feed it, care for it and exclaim over its loveliness, but there was nothing to guarantee that it would stay home with you. There had to be a lesson there somewhere.

I busted my butt trying to be everything to one person. Finally, I had to settle for being one thing to every person.

People are never satisfied. They crave too much then complain too much.

No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time.

It is hard luck on a young fellow to have expensive tastes, great expectations, aristocratic connections but no actual money in his pocket, and no profession by which he may earn any.

I thought we'd be a family always, but sometimes life doesn't work out the way we expect. When it doesn't, we just have to accept it and make the best of things.

No woman is the perfect woman, Cara. She can only ever be the right woman.

Name? the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised. Name, I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her. Age? she asked. Sex? Occupation? Writer, I said. Housewife, she said. Writer, I said. I'll just put down housewife, she said.

don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.

I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way.

Shirley Jackson

Sarei davvero una bella scema se pensassi che le persone hanno diritto all'amore degli altri; in vita mia ho meritato più amore e ne ho avuto meno di chiunque conosca.

Grant that Luke take me at my worth, she thought, or at least let me not see the difference. Let him be wise or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped completely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.