Quotes About Expectation

Sometimes I arrive too early. I rush, and some people cling longer to life than expected.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this morning, either.

expectation isn't the same as desire

I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything?

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.

How dare she show herself to be everything he was so annoyed with her for not being?

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

What do you want me to do?" he whispers into the empty air. It's hard to know. Oh Jimmy, you were so funny. Don't let me down. From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.

She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling.

I sort of like watching them, he said; I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that.

That's who is waiting for me: an invisible man defined by a dotted line: the shape of an absence in your place at the table, sitting across from me, eating toast and eggs as usual or walking ahead up the drive, a rustling of the fallen leaves, a slight thickening of the air. It's you in the future, we both know that. You'll be here but not here, a muscle memory, like hanging a hat on a hook that's not there any longer.

This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don't know what I'm waiting for. What are you waiting for? they used to say. That meant Hurry up. No answer was expected. For what are you waiting is a different question, and I have no answer for that one either.

People always forget about prophecies unless they come true.

The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen.