Selected expectations quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

4. 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.

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

6. Applause is a receipt, not a note of demand.

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

8. I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.

9. I am eagerly awaiting my next disappointment.

10. 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.

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

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

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

14. It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

15. 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?

16. 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.

17. 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.

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

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

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

21. If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

22. Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.

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

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

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

29. 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.

30. 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.

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

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

38. 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.

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

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

41. People are not here to meet your expectations.

42. John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you.

43. No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

44. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.

45. I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.

46. After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

47. Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything.

48. If you expect nothing, you're apt to be surprised. You'll get it.

49. If you have a job without any aggravations, you don't have a job.

50. On receiving from the people the sacred trust twice confided on my illustrious predecessor, and which he has discharged so faithfully and so well, I know that I can not expect to perform the arduous task with equal ability and success.

51. You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.

52. Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

53. How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

54. I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won't even pass me the coffee pot!

55. I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.

56. Life is just a bowl of pits.

57. My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.

58. The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

59. I broke my arm trying to fold a bed. It wasn't the kind that folds.

60. I went camping and borrowed a circus tent by mistake. I didn't notice until I got it set up. People complained because they couldn't see the lake.

61. Things have a way of turning out so badly.

62. People look at you and me to see what they are supposed to be. And, if we don't disappoint them, maybe, just maybe, they won't disappoint us.

63. Death by hanging. That, at least, I thought I would be spared.

64. James Caan told me at the end of filming 'Elf' that he had been waiting through the whole film for me to be funny - and I never was.

65. A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

66. 'Only, the beastly Arctic won't freeze,'

67. Everyone now, they look back and they're like, 'What happened to your sweet image that you used to be?' And I'm like, then when you came out you thought I was too provocative. It's like you can never win. No matter what you do, at the end of the day you can't please everybody, you know. I'm not here to please...

68. Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

69. We usually see only the things we are looking for - so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.

70. 'Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.'

71. Not by appointment do we meet delight or joy; They heed not our expectancy; But round some corner of the streets of life they of a sudden greet us with a smile.

72. The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

73. Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words 'bliss,' 'passion,' and 'rapture' -- words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

74. The surest plan to make a Man Is, think him so.

75. I want to be a diva, like 'people-totally-respect-my-music' diva, not diva like 'carry-my-diet-Coke-around'.

76. You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.

77. I go to restaurants and the groups always play 'Yesterday.' I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us 'Yesterday.' He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing 'I Am The Walrus.'

78. Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

79. Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don't over-analyse your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness.

80. I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me - and that I've made of myself - as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it.

81. 'You're no help,' he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

82. You frighten me when you say there isn't time. I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia. But it keeps not ending. So far, so good.

83. No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's - peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

84. For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like 'American Beauty.' We've become a heavy-handed society.

85. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

86. When we 'fall' in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects ... Love is the answer, we sing. ... our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.

87. Yes, I don't know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

88. A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

89. 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.

90. 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.

91. '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.'

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

93. 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.

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

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

96. 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.

97. 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.

98. 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.

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

100. 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.