Quotes About Expectation

I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.

He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read.

I lit one of Mr. Talbot's cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.

There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.

So is he gonna wake up from that nap yet or what?

She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes.

Life is what happens, Magnus, no matter what you expect or want.

What is he?' 'What would you have him be?

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act.

128We want both, to burn it down and be no one and to be recognized by the dog on the daily walk up the drive from work and we get both but never exactly when and how we imagined it.

Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?

A manilla envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it.

Nearly all of us would like to be at the end of the story, because to live in the middle of it is to live in suspense and uncertainty about what will happen.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future

So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everthing else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, itÄs also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

One young woman sheltered with her boyfriend's parents in northern London on the third night of the Blitz. In the long account she wrote the next day, she complained that her hostess made them all tea "just for something to do" and added that "that's one trouble about the raids, people do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.

We don't know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

I was near, even though she couldn't see me. But then I'm always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can't

Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present.

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the unofficial Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (the land would not be officially called Palestine until after 135 C.E.)

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern-day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment. Many of these so-called false messiahs we know by name.