Quotes About Expectations

Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations. That's a good reminder, right there. If you didn't lose your husband and kids all in one year, smile! You're ahead of the game.

A mother's unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.

She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time.

Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes," he still loves to say, as often as possible. "It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

It's true. I'm not a happy-on-the-midlist kind of gal.

the secret of happiness is low expectations.

If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight

It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

LISTEN, don't believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl's bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you're Adah.

Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

If anybody else had ever wanted me happy, they could have fooled me. Possibly Mom, as long as it didn't cross tracks with her own maneuvers. That's all people really want, for you to fit into their maneuvers.

In Blanche's experience, the more a person believed love was a part of what they got from their employer, the more likely it was that the person was being asked to do things that only love could justify.

When I got home last night my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive. So I took her to a gas station and then the fight started.

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.

in my experience, one of the guiding principles of human relations is "what have you done for me lately"—but it was something, a small antidote against the potential poison of his professional affiliations.

unconscious expectations were simply assumptions based primarily on foolish prejudice, itself likely the product of a lack of thought and experience

She wondered what it was about men that wed them more to a way of doing things than to achieving their ostensible goals.

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.