Quotes About Expectation

If you ask for too much, you lose even that which you have.

One is never ready for success. It consecrates and looses you at the same time.

We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.

The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.

childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise.

When you've waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.

I expect readers to read in my books something I didn't know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn't know.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

Çevresini saran karanl?k, kalle? dünya birden gizli zenginliklerini sunuyormu?, ya?amdan hala, toplu sözle?menin saat ücreti, ek ücret,çocuk yard?m?, pahal?l?k yard?m? d???nda da bir ?ey beklenebilirmi? gibi geldi Marcovaldo'ya.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavias inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

È dell'uomo attendere. Dell'uomo giusto, attendere con fiducia; dell'ingiusto, con paura.

Il momento che più conta per me è quello che precede la lettura. Alle volte è il titolo che basta ad accendere in me il desiderio d'un libro che forse non esiste. Alle volte è l'incipit del libro, le prime frasi...Insomma: se a voi basta poco per mettere in moto l'immaginazione, a me basta ancor meno: la promessa della lettura.

Here is page 31 again, page 32 ... and then what comes next? Page 17 all over again, a third time! What kind of book did they sell you, anyway? They bound together all these copies of the same signature, not another page in the whole book is any good.

Leer es ir al encuentro de algo que está a punto de ser y aún nadie sabe qué será.

She looked right at me and said nothing. I assumed it was because she was hanging from my every word, so I continued.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.