Quotes About Expectations

We seem to feel as though the life our children have -- that we have built for them -- is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.

Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sense that after all the hard work, for all our achievements as individuals and as a postfeminist generation, life should be better than this.

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences.

Suppose there aren't any more A + days once you get to be twelve? Wouldn't that be something! To spend the rest of your life looking for an A + day and not finding it.

As a kid, Vix had had some warped idea that grownup meant having a job and living on your own. It meant no one could tell you what to eat, or what to wear, or how to behave. It meant that it was okay to have sex with guys. What a joke!

I made promises to you that I'm not sure I can keep.

You weren't always born to the right parents. And parents didn't necessarily get the kids they were meant to raise.

Be careful,' Irene warned Miri. 'All boys want the same thing.' So do girls, Miri thought.

because everyone knew you knitted argyle socks only for a boyfriend.

To be ordinary was a fate worse than death.

Poor Mr. Benedict. He was really disappointed. The way he talked to us I got the feeling we made him nervous. Nobody seemed scared of him at all and you should always be a little scared of your teacher.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Agendas tend to drain the life out of relationships.

She looked at me in a troubled sort of way, the way I look today at people who rave about the food at Applebee's or the Olive Garden.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.

I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

I don't care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

We cannot look at the past or the future except by means of the imagination but again the imagination of backward glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead something else. Even the psychologists concede this present particular, for, with them, memory involves a reproductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power: the power of our expectations.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel.

I had, in fact, long ago decided what I expected to hear from the Spirit, and when I did not hear precisely that, I had felt betrayed. Whatever else the Spirit might have been telling me at that hour, I could not hear. I was so intent on hearing only one message, the message I wanted to hear, that I was not really listening at all.

This tendency to set acceptable conditions upon God, to seek unconsciously to make his will for us coincide with our desires, is a very human trait.