Quotes About Anticipation

I'm going to name a name: Janet Evanovich. She writes the same book over and over, and I read every single one of them and eagerly anticipate them.

If you're ever dragged from your chambers at midnight, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether you're off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, you'll find that you turn and return to that pivotal moment.

I assume we'll be a little bit surprised—that's what tomorrows promise. Something unexpected. That's about all we can believe in, most days.

History has its own evolutionary strategy, toward consequentialities we cannot anticipate.

He set out once more, with a sense that his life would be rich in setting outs, and perhaps poorer in homecomings.

The typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise.

To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory.

Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping--these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.

arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate. p 84

One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past. —Elias Canetti, The Human Province

To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory. Any single happy experience may be amplified or minimized, depending on how much attention you give it.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me.… They remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

realized, happiness has four stages. To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory. Any single happy experience may be amplified or minimized, depending on how much attention

anticipation of happiness is sometimes greater than the happiness actually experienced. All the more reason to revel in anticipation.

For instance, if it's 9 a.m. and I have an appointment at 11 a.m., I'll think 'Oh, I have to go somewhere in two hours, so I can't really start anything serious' and then end up wasting my whole morning waiting for one thing to happen.

Now, I see that it's like saving money, you can't save for when you get laid off, after you get laid off; rather, you have to save while you have a job and the money is still coming in. Life is like that, you have to DO while you are able to think of what you want, what you like, what needs it will fill, how it will enhance your life, how it will help you to maintain you, so that you have some reserves when crunch time comes.

How slow life is, how violent hope is.

Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.

There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough.

Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

We aren't there yet,' said Bouvard. Let's hope not,' said Pecuchet.

Coming delights, like tropical beaches, send out their native enchantment over the vast spaces that precede them - a perfumed breeze that lulls and drugs you out of all anxiety as to what may yet await you below the horizon.

Het is vreemd met hoe weinig vertrouwen in geluk ik geboren ben. Heel jong al voorvoelde ik precies wat het leven zou worden. Het was als een weerzinwekkende etensgeur, die uit een keldergat ontsnapte. Je hoeft er niet van gegeten te hebben om te weten dat je er kotsmisselijk van wordt. - Gustave Flaubert

And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what that chance would be, what wind would waft it to her, where it would set her ashore, whether it was a launch or a three-decker, laden with anguish or filled to the portholes with happiness. But every morning when she woke she hoped to find it there.