Quotes About Expectations

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part.

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

So we blame ourselves for being too outspoken or too proud or too ambitious.

I don't have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country's neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us.

You have an Asian mother," she said. "She has to be interesting.

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria.

Early on, my father learned that in America, one must be emotionally demonstrative to succeed, so he has a habit of saying "I love you" indiscriminately, to his daughters, to his employees, to his customers, and to airline personnel

Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn't have to suffer. Then she asked, "Why do you make yourself suffer?

Many working mothers feel guilty about not being at home. And when they are there, they wish it could be perfect. This pressure to make every minute happy puts working parents in a bind when it comes to setting limits and modifying behavior.

If you can't handle me in sweatpants, you don't deserve me in stilettos

If you can't handle can't handle me in sweatpants, You don't deserve me in stilettos

There's no limit to what you can dream. You expect the unexpected, you believe in magic, in fairy tales, and in possibilities. Then you grow older and that innocence is shattered and somewhere along the way the reality of life gets in the way and you're hit by the realization that you can't be all you wanted to be, you just might have to settle for a little bit less.

She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As

In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.

women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.

How could he have thought a single good thing about these men, all of their fine talk and promises. Even his pa. Not a one of them was as good as their word.

Are you sure there's no way of getting the lad's fancies out of his head? There are so many other things a young manwom can take up nowadays. What about hairdressing? Beard-perms and hair-sets are so fashionable at the moment.

There's always going to be that pressure when you're in front of the camera. When you're famous it's just an extreme version of reality and there's a pressure to look a certain way.

Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.

When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff.

Until woman as she is can drive this plastic spectre out of her own and her man's imagination she will continue to apologize and disguise herself, while accepting her male's pot-belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, baldness and other ugliness without complaint.

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.