Quotes About Expectation

Why did you not tell me this earlier?" "Because you never asked. I was waiting to be questioned, but apparently your aversion to me

We all assume that we have our tomorrows to look forward to, but we never truly know what's waiting just around the corner.

I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can't fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly.

And I will never again underestimate the power of anticipation. There is no better boost in the present than an invitation into the future.

She looks out the window at Reno, which looks like Vegas and yet also looks nothing like Vegas. It's lesser, smaller, worse.

It's like Michael Cunningham says in The Hours: Happiness is believing that you're gonna be happy. It's hope.

I can't wait to get out of here. My parents... they act like everything since high school blows, like they'd get in a time machine if they could. IT's so sad. I mean life is all about what's next, you know?

I know. Life isn't fair. But just once, I wanted love to be fair. I did everything right. Everything. And now I'm losing you, aren't I?

Everyone wants everything right now but you are able to wait with Such small hands.

Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I'd been doing as much for twenty years.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Which is worse, she thinks, waiting for the sting, or the sting itself?

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.

I am not lonely, living this way, because I have given up expecting that loneliness can be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one." — Martha Gellhorn, in a letter to Campbell Beckett, from Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming — Carolyn Forché, from "Travel Papers," In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin Press, 2020)

Lesson number four: If someone promises to do great things, ask them first for something small, like a bridge or a cow.

Again time elapsed.

Life is never what you expect it to be. Sex has more to do with salt than sweetness. The sky is white as often as it's blue.

Her face was like a pot of tea about to whistle.

Once, she believed that she was only waiting for something to happen to her. And yet now it seems that something has begun around her. The thing she has been waiting for?though she cannot say what it is?has started making itself felt in the very air around her. She does not know how to behave, she realizes, nor what to expect. She does not even know anymore what to hope for.

Because what can you do with people that like you, except, of course, inevitably disappoint them?

Immediate gratification takes too long.