Quotes About Expectations

This is incredibly unlike our modern world. We expect a single working mother to be the one to throw the baseball with her eight-year-old, rock the newborn, read to the three-year-old, and, by the way, cook a nutritious meal, help with homework, do the laundry, get everyone to bed, then wake up and get them all ready for childcare and school so she can go work all day, only to rush home to do it all again. All alone.

Why do money and possessions so rarely bring the happiness we expect? Because they often distance us from one another, rather than bringing us closer, emphasizing status gaps, not narrowing them. And, finally, what causes much of life's most agonizing pain? This, too, is related to relationships—those we lose, fail to maintain, or that become one-sided or abusive.

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we're thrown when they don't. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities... We're all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.

Each of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives will unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit.

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we're thrown when they don't. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities. Even people who are linear in one area (a stable career, say, or long-running marriage) are nonlinear in others (recurrent health problems or frequent changes in their religious identity).

Neurotics are only too eager to figure out what other people want from them so they can fulfill or thwart those other people's desires.

Some argue that it is the very attempt to institutionalize love that destroys it. The more love is rendered obligatory, a duty, whether religious, moral, or otherwise, the more it shrivels up and dies like a plant cultivated under the wrong conditions. "If we really love each other, why do we need a stupid piece of paper?" they ask.

Whenever we force ourselves to conform to our ideals at the expense of our own satisfaction, we assure the Other's jouissance.

However, as pursuit of happiness morphed into pursuit of material, all of the promises became compromised. So what went wrong? How did this happen?

Parenting: Nobody really wants the job, but everybody thinks they can do better.

if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you're absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others. Since this ideal is an impossibility, you can never live up to it. You are merely in love with this ideal, and there is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castigating. It hides under the mask of "self-improvement." It never works.

I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather . It's something you just endure.

Because these things never work out as you plan. Reality's a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams.…

I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird.

I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»

It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.

Higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible. —Arnold Kling, "College Customers vs. Suppliers"41

Adult life is terrible, Hazel. Never grow up. Everything's complicated, and there are too many rules ...

People who require from others to take them «as they are» usually don't seek to take the others as they are.

Yet the more I think about it the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for one another. I cannot live up to your standards, senior wife. So I have to set my own.

When you're twenty-two and you pass out at a friend's house, it's totally normal. When you do it at forty-two, you're never invited back.

Ya know, if you treat every comic the way you treated me tonight, You would never see a bad show.

Ya know, if you treated every comic the way you treated me tonight. You would never see a bad show.