Quotes About Anticipation

We are never prepared for what we expect

The real poet has the last line in mind when he writes his first.

To live in thoughts of what you might have done, or in dreams of what you mean to do, this is folly: but to put away regret, to anchor anticipation, and to do and to work now, this is wisdom. Whilst a man is dwelling upon the past or future he is missing the present; he is forgetting to live now. All things are possible now, and only now.

Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen.

It's funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven't had the time—and now you won't have the time—to say it to yourself.

I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

Tell me," he said, "what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?

They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end.

What you think is going to happen?" "What we make happen," says Joseph—again, with resolution.

TROUPE: Do you have any feelings about yuppies? BALDWIN: I saw them coming. I knew them. They can't, I'm afraid, be taught anything.

She knew that he was going to leave her. It was in his walk, his talk, his eyes. He wanted to go. He had already moved back, crouching to leap. And she had no rival. He was not going to another woman. He simply wanted to go. It would happen today, tomorrow, three weeks from today; it was over, she could do nothing about it; neither could she save herself by jumping first.

The subject of the chapter is not what we might expect from the title.

It's vast to be alive," he said happily. "I can almost hear the rain waiting to be born.

All dressed up and no one to kill.

L.A. Weekly piece was coming out in mid-February. Day One

if we had some bacon, we could have some bacon and eggs, if we had some eggs!

I want to see you tomorrow, but I don't know what this thing with my parents is going to be like. When you go to lunch, sit so you can see into the Men's section. If my back is turned, I can't meet you. If I'm facing you, I can meet you and the number of plates on my tray is the time I'll be here. What if you can't come till midnight? Then I'm going to look like a fucking idiot.

The future is unwritten. What will be will be.

he sits and waits and hopes that at some

There is no getting into the future except by waiting.

Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these—not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach—is our now.