Quotes About Expectations

Success is hard in general for most women. We now have such busy lives, and we're told we can do everything - you know, we can have the relationship and the marriage and the kids and the career.

I was of the "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, then wonder why life didn't give you freaking sugar so you could drink the stuff" school of thought.

In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.

Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman.

After all my work to make something of myself how do you think I feel when I see how disappointed you are in me? When you find fault with me every time I so much as turn around?

I go to the movies a lot, and I regret when I see some actor that I used to like, to find them offering no more surprises.

Everyone I looked at, their whole lives, did exactly what they were supposed to do without even questioning it, without even wondering if they could do something different.

That is the delusion of which I speak! You wish the joys of true love upon every milkmaid and stable boy in your land, and yet you consign yourself and another to lives of pure misery that you might possess a well-proportioned ballroom.

Whatever role we are loved for in our family, we will continue to enact it, despite the toll it takes.

Why have boundaries if everyone is going to drive through them, leaving nothing but rubble? No one's going to do what I want. Why should they?" Laura had just perfectly defined powerlessness, and powerlessness in a relationship is one of the main causes of stress or anxiety.

As one of my sons always says, "normal" is just a setting on a washing machine.)

Finally, chocking with sobs, she said, "I was nice every time because I thought maybe this time she'll love me. I thought I just hadn't found the right combination of things to do. There was always the next time. Just one morning I wanted to come down the stairs and have her not say 'Good morning, monster.' If I worked hard enough, I'd find how to make her love me.

I think Steve holds no interest for you because you have no idea what your role would be in the relationship. You might not have to rescue him." Then I paused and said with vehemence, "You'd be out of a job.

Children who are given adult responsibilities when they're too young to handle them are forever after worried about properly fulfilling their responsibilities; they never seem to accept that they were too young to manage the task but instead internalize their failure to accomplish it.

There's always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl.

I want you to be crazy about me," I'd said, and he said, "You want that. I know. But you also want space to think and work. Freedom. You want to rest sometimes. You'd hate me if I tried to contain you." He'd sighed, pressed his lips into a thin line. "I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash," he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

But sometimes I worried that marriage was just a series of these small deflations, our dreams floating around invisibly near the ceiling like escaped gas.

See, this is why I was by myself all those years. Because as soon as you let people in, they start depending on you. And then, if you can't be everything they think you should be, you've let them down. It's easier not to have anybody around at all.

When I dreamed about the time you would actually sleep with me, I thought there'd be some sleeping involved.

Not a one of us can be everything somebody else wants us to be. Trouble comes when we try to pretend we can. Or when people see it like a betrayal. You know. That somebody won't meet all their needs. My mom used to say it's because we weren't put here on earth to take care of each other. And that it's silly to get mad at someone for letting you down when they're just being who they are. She said it's like getting mad at your dog for not being a cat.

Not everybody who marries in the church and has a family the old-fashioned way is unhappy." "No, but some are. And even if it's just hit-and-miss . . . even if anybody can fall through the cracks, it's still not what I thought I was buying into at all. It still all feels like it makes no sense.

took her hands away from her face. It was hard to do. She knew she looked a wreck. But if you can't trust a man to look at your real face and not run screaming, what good is it to have him around in the first place?

They had shopping carts full of food and toys, but they looked bored and unhappy. How could a person go to the store, buy everything she needed—and wanted, from the look of some of those carts—and still seem dissatisfied? What more did they need to be happy, then? If all this wouldn't do it?

No good deed goes unpunished, she thought as she stepped into the outer office. Somehow it had fallen to her not only to teach the boy to read, but to heal his traumatic life. And all she had wanted was to buy a few cartons of unusually fresh eggs.