Quotes About Expectation

Hope is the greatest madness. What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?

Time dribbles through our fingers while we wait.

You were the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all that we needed.

That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

It was always best to step into the future while it was still waiting for you.

You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.

For six months I did what women do: I waited. This is what women are taught to be good at. It's said that a woman's life is merely preparation for the primal nine-month wait. Whatever the reason, they do it well. Sometimes they drink or bite their fingernails down to the wrist. They count stars and initials and wait: for something to happen, for something to pass, to change, to begin, to end.

One morning when the air was misleading and mild with hope....

You are the one who taught me that love was never what we expected it to be and that it was all we needed.

People all over town had listened for my grandfather's cries, but there were none. Only silence.

Shouldn't he have waited?" "Not when you told him to go away. People believe you when you say things like that. You never told him you loved him, did you?

Sometimes you think you know what's going to happen next, and then the world surprises you

In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you'll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.

She liked soot, and heat, and grime, and she was beginning to realize, if she didn't actually like her aloneness, she was at least comforted by it. She should be grateful; she knew, she knew. She should be thrilled just to be alive. So why was it she preferred to expect nothing?

When you look into your own future, you may see only what you want to see, and even the wisest woman can make a mistake, especially in matters of love.

Love begins in curious ways, in daylight or in darkness, when you are in search of it or when you least expect to find it. You may think it is one thing, when in fact it is something else entirely: infatuation, loneliness, seduction

She feels a little chill of expectation down her spine. There is someone, somewhere, who knows she's alive. "Somebody writes to me, Mom," Shelby tries to explain. "They think they know me. Maybe they read about me in the paper.

Sometimes you know when doors will open; you have only to walk up to them and wait.

Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn, and all it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to.

She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father's breath as his lips opened and touched closed. Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have

Once you learn to do it, you'll be expected to do it.

Her husband put his arm across the back of the seat. "Everybody set to go?" he said. He had been too harsh with Michael, too derisive of Jacob, and who knew what his daughter needed, looking up at him, the bear in her arms. "I'm ready," she said, primly, the first to respond. The apple of his eye.

As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.