Quotes About Expectation

A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.

Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.

Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. That was a luna. Crys shrugged. So? So? So what? You want it should sing, too?

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it.

She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, Irene, you don't know how becoming that looks. As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.  

Then comes the day where Turp is waiting by my locker like a big red balloon fixing to pop.

Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of.

To tell me it's supposed to stop raining, you came up here?" Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.

All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel.

I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

Something in his nature just did not expect good things in store.

You feel like you'll never run into another one that's worth turning your head around for, but you will. You'll see." "No

And the Tory Party. That's why I said I felt trouble was brewing. Arthur Balfour is attempting to sit on the fence, but that won't do him much good. He may well find himself out of 10 Downing Street sooner than he expects.

I've gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion's infection.

The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly.

Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be.

Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be.

The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control. And because of this, I think, lack of control does not lead to feelings of helplessness and depression.

simply by being aware of the process we can anticipate its effects, and therefore be less disappointed when it comes. This means that when we are making decisions, we should think about how each of the options will feel not just tomorrow, but months or even years later.