Quotes About Expectation

You've got to be responsible for your own happiness - you can't expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel.

Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?

How come I can't make her happy, how come she can't make me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn't taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is on the wrong wavelength.

People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.

Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?

Beware of dreams," Elizabeth Finch replied. "Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.

In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

I didn't want to press Veronica. I thought I'd wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn't expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years. Well, perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps she'd gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart?

Razumem da u tom svesnom skretanju pogleda može biti i ne?eg pozitivnog: lakše je gurati dalje ako ne prime?ujete neprijatne stvari. Ali, ako ne prime?ujete neprijatne stvari, na kraju ?ete poverovati da do njih nikad i ne dolazi. Uvek vas iznenade.

Más adelante, en la vida, confías en descansar un poco, ¿no? Crees que te lo mereces. Yo sí, en todo caso. Pero entonces empiezas a comprender que a la vida no le incumbe recompensar el mérito.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty.

Qué vanidad tan curiosa es la que impulsa al presente a esperar que el pasado se amamante de él.

And in your opinion, the notion that everything works out in the end, and the counter-notion that nothing ever does, are both equally banal.

Chi poteva sapere come l'avrebbe pensata, il futuro? Ci aspettiamo troppo dal domani, sperando che sappia contrastare l'oggi.

Arthur, my dear," she interrupts. "There is something I wish to talk about." He looks surprised, and slightly alarmed. If he has always valued her directness, there is a residual suspicion within him that whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something to a man's comfort or advantage.

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood

Nobody ever told you to expect any more than you were given. There are many men who would think it a fine thing to be a cleric living in a large rectory, without having to do a stroke of work from January to December.

be honest, he sometimes felt a creeping impatience for his father to quit the scene, leaving John as his uncle's direct heir.

Go ahead, then. He likes his back rubbed. And his head scratched. The creature inflicts grievous wounds upon my person and expects me to forgive it? I expect a lot of creatures inflict grievous wounds and expect forgiveness.

The butterflies did a slow orbit in her stomach.

He wasn't at all what she expected. No: this wasn't true. He was everything she'd expected from everything she'd read about him—he was irritating, frivolous, arrogant, disconcertingly charming. It was just that she would not have suspected his intelligence had depth, that his wit was in part defense, that his charm was a result of, in part, startlingly acute perception and even…grace.