Quotes About Expectations

Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.

I don't go up to guys. I'm all about a guy sending me flowers, getting me chocolates and surprising me.

Innovation, surprising people and creating a sense of wonder is what consumers want.

You think a lot of people get to be big stars and get a little crazy, but most of the ones I've ever met have always been surprisingly normal, and I've enjoyed that.

I've hit 1, 2 and surprisingly I've hit 3 most of my life. Not that I'm going to be hitting 3, but I feel like those are three really different positions in the lineup. And I feel like I've done all of them. I know what's expected at each one of those, and I feel like you can take that experience away.

To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote - it's surreal, way beyond what we expected.

In India, we surrender and compromise. We end up getting a star who is not fitting the character.

People are impatient. They want things to happen overnight, and have no idea of the circumstances and situations that can surround an individual at times.

I don't know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn't do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I'd have when I had been young and looking ahead to things.

In his better moments, Mr Baxter is a decent, ordinary guy — a guy you wouldn't mistake for anyone special. But he is special. In my book, he is. For one thing he has a full night's sleep behind him, and he's just embraced his wife before leaving for work. But even before he goes, he's already expected home a set number of hours later. True, in the grander scheme of things, his return will be an event of small moment — but an event nonetheless.

I thought we'd be like that too when we got old enough. Dignified. And in a place. And people would come to our door.

the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early. It would be terrible anyway; it always is. It

It's so hard for women – even nice women – to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.

At twenty-nine a dish like this would almost certainly have been married.

The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

For such a woman, a child is so substantial a setback to her own ambition that, in order to offset the setback, the child must earn back its existence by being so exceptional as to add to, rather than subtract from, the ambitious mother's tallying of her successes. So feminism, I am sorry to say, has only intensified the projectification of children.

And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.

It described the double bind of women in that moment: they were getting congratulations for being fully liberated and empowered while being punished by a host of articles, reports, and books telling them that, in becoming liberated, they had become miserable; they were incomplete, missing out, losing, lonely, desperate.

Society's recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don't find happiness.

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll's self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring beaters and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.