Quotes About Expectations

A.J. apologizes but he is not sorry. Who are these people who think a book comes with a guarantee that they will like it?

Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp

I didn't call you because I had met someone better, and when that didn't work out, I decided to give you a second chance. So don't be thinking you're superior. You've got a decent smile, I'll give you that, but your teeth are too big and so is your ass and you're not twenty-five anymore even if you drink like you are. You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sometimes I feel like the wedding is a Trojan horse. The dream I peddle to distract from the reality of a marriage. They choose these things to distinguish themselves from everyone else. They choose these things to make themselves feel less ordinary. But is there anything more ordinary than choosing to get married?

We had both heard worse. People were often the worst versions of themselves in the months leading up to a wedding. Occasionally, though, the worst version of someone was the actual version of someone, but it was difficult to know if one was in that situation until after the fact.

probably going to fail and then I'll probably end up just like my mother." She stands up from

she doesn't want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows.

Su madre siempre le dice que por culpa de las novelas es incapaz de apreciar a los hombres de carne y hueso, observación que Amelia se toma como un insulto, ya que da a entender que solo lee libros con héroes románticos clásicos.

Maybe I could paint flats or print programs or something?" She wants to say How unlike you, but she resists. Aside from her husband, she believes her brother-in-law to be one of the most selfish and self-centered men she has ever met. If one afternoon with a baby can have such a refining influence on A.J., imagine what could happen to Daniel when the baby is born.

Las cubiertas son las cenicientas de las editoriales. Les echamos la culpa de todo.

She is thirty-one years old and she thinks she should have met someone by now.

She is thirty-one years old and she thinks she should have met someone by now. And yet . . . Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn't share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?)

Yo podría ser un mal libro con una cubierta bonita [...]. —Nada de eso. Llevo años viéndote en la estantería. He leído la sinopsis y las citas de la contraportada.

She was pretty enough but somehow like dough that had not been allowed to rise.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn't turned out to be.

I was little there were times I wanted my parents to be normal. I wanted them to have a religion. I wanted them to have a job, like the parents of every other kid I went to school with.

He that promises most will perform least.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they're sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you're poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

From a very early age, girls were taught to restrain themselves physically and emotionally.

Throughout American history, the concept of the woman as a protected homebody went hand in hand with the reality that most women—poor women—were expected to work and were not given any special deference because of their sex. By going off to sling rivets or weld airplane wings, middle-class women lost their status and joined the other part of American womanhood that was expected to fend for itself.

the men she had known at university, with their practised uncouthness, their masculine argumentation, the way they assumed ownership of the women they lassoed into their grasp. She had endured them, her series of clever boyfriends, who expected her to pick up their towels and edit their poor prose. They had all exemplified the modish paranoias of their age. They were conceited over-achievers and smugly privileged. It had been a relief to fly away,

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.

early marriage usually foreclosed the possibility of a career dream.