316 Expectations Quotes

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

This is serious: some of the things that are supposed to last the rest of my life are already wearing out.

Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.

To expect ... the same service from raw and undisciplined recruits, as from veteran soldiers, is to expect what never did and perhaps never will happen. Men, who are familiarized to danger, meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

My dad was undeniably famous when I was a kid - he was on Wogan and Clive James and the radio every week, but as far as I was concerned he wasn't famous enough. My best friend was Ben Brooke-Taylor. His dad Tim was in The Goodies - that was famous.

Of course in Miami, not denouncing Fidel Castro at every turn is almost as bad as saying Gloria Estefan can't sing.

It is always so, I guess, validating when you meet somebody that you esteem -- and then they turn out to be everything [you thought] and more.

What makes a date so dreadful is the weight of expectation attached to it. There is every chance that you may meet your soulmate, get married, have children and be buried side by side. There is an equal chance that the person you meet will look as if they've already been buried for some time.

Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.

Why were the little girls all frightened To be just what they are The boys were told to ask themselves How high how far The girls were told to reach the shelves While the boys were reaching stars That's why little girls were frightened To be just what they are.

My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.

When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.

The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset - that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.

'I've never believed anyone could put more pressure on me than I put on myself. People expect great things from me. I expect great things from myself.'

I went to a general store, but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.

You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there's one more step? I'm like that all the time.

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included - so I had to buy them again.

'I want a man who's kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?'

For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.

People that haven't seen us yet are shocked because they think that Alice Cooper must be a female folksinger. They don't expect the whole thing. And the whole thing is a direct product of television and movies and America, 'cause that's where America's based. That's where their heart is from the sex and violence of TV and the movies, and that was our influence.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism. If he is poor he is against existing things because he cannot succeed. If he is rich, he is not faithful to his ideals. The world always demands of a prophet a double standard. He must live a life consistent with his dreams, and at the same time must obey the conventions of the world. He cannot be judged either by one or the other, but must be judged by both.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel.

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal-blue chickens.

Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

They look quite promising in the shop, and not entirely without hope when I get them back into my wardrobe. But then, when I put them on they tend to deteriorate with a very strange rapidity and one feels sorry for them.

Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

'I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' [Pause.] The twenty-five percent is for error.'

In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or, having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. These are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons, lovers, and so forth. All the killed children.

If my fans think I can do everything I say I can do, then they're crazier than I am.

I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind.

Ender Wiggin was not larger than life, Bean knew. He was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him. And yet he was bearing it. So far.

To him, their marriage was his very soul. To [her], their marriage was just a friendship with sex.

It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him. A man when he gets into a higher sphere, into other habits of life, cannot keep up all his former connections. Then, Sir, those who knew him formerly upon a level with themselves, may think that they ought still to be treated as on a level, which cannot be; and an acquaintance in a former situation may bring out things which it would be very disagreeable to have mentioned before higher company, though, perhaps, everybody knows of them.

It's like a child who is used to having ice cream whenever he wants. When it doesn't come when he asks he tends to get confused and nervous

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians

It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only

What IS is more important than WHAT SHOULD BE. To many people are looking at 'what is' from a position of thinking 'what should be.'

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can't get out of, but I think this is very usual in life. There are people, particularly dumb people, who are in terrible trouble and never get out of it, because they're not intelligent enough. It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry - or laugh.

We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.

I got a new shadow. I had to get rid of the other one-it wasn't doing what I was doing.

They have seen in his round, jolly fruitful face, post-offices, land-offices, marshalships and cabinet-appointments, charge-ships and foreign missions, bursting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. Nobody has ever expected me to be president. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting.

I went to a pizzeria, I ordered a slice of pizza, the fucker gave me the smallest slice possible. If the pizza was a pie chart for what people would do if they found a million dollars, the fucker gave me the 'donate it to charity' slice. I would like to exchange this for the 'keep it!'[4]

The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley; And leave us naught but grief and pain For promised joy.

'I'm not going to do nothing anymore.' 'Never again?' 'Well, not so much. They don't let you.'

Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry: All her maidens, watching, said, 'She must weep or she will die.'

Everybody always knows where they stand with you, dont they?

I don't have any idea what to order, so I talk to a few of the folks milling around outside. I think I've got it straight, but then I go inside and find a factory that would make Willy Wonka blush. I'm lost in a sea of possibilities.

Last night I was east with them And west within Trying to be for you what you wanna see.

It is other people who want me to win medals.

Vanity: 'Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.'

Imagination: 'The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.'

Reputation: 'Unfortunately, your reputation often rests not on your ability to do what you say, but rather on your ability to do what people expect.'

I don't think that fans of RAGE or Soundgarden will be disappointed.

You know the worst thing about niggers? Niggers always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigger will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigger will say some shit like, 'I take care of my kids.' You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? 'I ain't never been to jail!' What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!

Cal's wife : Nigga get a real job!

I experienced one of my most starstruck moments at the Oasis show. Now, there are a handful of people who will get me starstruck, but generally, I'm able to handle myself because if I meet them it's at a place where I wouldn't be surprised to do so. I did not expect to see Trent Reznor in Las Vegas at this Oasis show, so when I did, I had a little episode. Needless to say I totally dorked out and fan-boyed all over the accommodating gentleman for about 4.5 seconds before letting him be free of me. He was cool. It was nifty. Bowie, you're next.

Rabbits. You know bunnies. If you don't look out for them, the little bastards sneak up on you and bite you and shit.

(Before Green Day was about to play) Their drummer is a very troubled young man, watch him.

(Before Green Day) Whenever our next guests are on the show, we hope and pray that they don't break anything.

(On performing) We do this because we have to. Do we look like we're having fun?

'I hope that Dreamworks can sell enough records that they're happy - so I don't get dropped.'

The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science.

Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie.

At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven.

A day off is always more welcome when it's unexpected.

Io ho inteso che un gallo basta assai bene a diece galline, ma che diece uomini posson male o con fatica una femina sodisfare.

What do you expect for your $12,000?