Quotes About Expectation

Marching on a promise never given

your mind, it would seem, these are but titles. Responsibilities one grows into, as it were. But the truth of it is, the title awaits only those who have already grown into a person worthy of the responsibility.

Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.

Sure. He came expecting to find two brains and found barely one.

Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out.

if his efforts are mediocre, we're likely to let him live. If he shows us brilliance, we'll kill him.

The critical part of herself could well have sneered at the contrivance, as if the only genuine gestures were the small ones, the ones devoid of an audience. As if true honesty belonged to solitude, since to be witnessed was to perform, and performance was inherently false since it invited expectation.

Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist says 'Oh dear, things can't possibly get any worse.' And an optimist says, 'Don't be so sad. Things can always get worse.

I'm thinking about babies. Emma's baby. Jack and my baby. Growing in my mind, if not in my womb.

In one of the paradoxes of storytelling, readers want to predict how the story will end (or how it will get to the end), but they want to be wrong.

Typically, readers don't get bored because too little is happening but because too little is being promised.

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope's finest expression. In hope's loss, however, is the greatest despair.

But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry.

Our lives will be a wealth of expectation and consummation," says one character eagerly, and conspicuous consumption and concupiscent consummation intertwine in a heady celebration of the material world.

When you say anything controversial, you are likely to be blamed not so much for what you have said as for what people think that someone who has said what you said would also say.

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.

Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow.

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.

You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there's one more step? I'm like that all the time.

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

I saw a bank that said '24 Hour Banking,' but I don't have that much time.

I plan to be spontaneous tomorrow.

Right now I'm not involved with anybody, but I hope by 75 I will be again.

You know, the man of my dreams might walk round the corner tomorrow. I'm older and wiser and I think I'd make a great girlfriend. I live in the realm of romantic possibility.