disappointment Quotes

“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”

“That’s the worst of growing up, and I’m beginning to realize it. The things you wanted so much when you were a child don’t seem half so wonderful to you when you get them.”

“It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.”

“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”

″Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good are a sort of death. We’ve just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.″

“This place I am hoping to get to is so marvelous that if I described it to you now you would go crazy with excitement. And then, if we failed to get there (which is very possible), you would die of disappointment. I don’t want to raise your hopes too much, my darlings.”

“Coraline shook her head. ‘Why don’t you play with me?’ she asked. ‘Busy,’ he said. ‘Working,’ he added. He still hadn’t turned around to look at her.”

“I’m sure I was a huge disappointment. I’m not pretty or smart or athletic. I’m just like them - an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies.”

“Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.”

“As she’s laying it out on the tissue paper, I take out my purse, open it up, and reach for my VISA card in one seamless, automatic action--but my fingers hit bare leather. I stop in surprise and start to rummage through all the pockets of my purse, wondering if I stuffed my card back in somewhere with a receipt or if it’s hidden underneath a business card...and them with a sickening thud, I remember. It’s on my desk.”

“There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.”

“When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of the strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance.”

“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.”

″ ‘We’ve had an ACCIDENT!’ the children screamed in a frenzy of delight. ‘But nobody’s killed,’ June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car…”

“I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed . . . Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.”

“But a frantic inspection of the boys’ department revealed no suits to fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course – in such cases it is the thing to blame the store.”

“This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat . . . and they brought me a bottle of milk!”

“George: there are easier things than being married to the daughter of the president of that university. Martha: … for some men it would be the chance of a life time.”

“I was glad to see other faces and at the same time disappointed that the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people. Even a twelve-year-old couldn’t be trusted anymore.”

“I despise you and everything you stand for.”

“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.”

“Puddleglum’s question annoyed her because, deep down inside her, she was already annoyed with herself for not knowing the Lion’s lesson quite so well as she felt she ought to have known it. This annoyance, added to the misery of being very cold and tired, made her say, ‘Bother the signs.’ She didn’t perhaps quite mean it.”

“No. About… Oh hell, don’t you understand? I didn’t even realize I was talking. It’s the beginning of the end. It’s all downhill from here, and I didn’t have very far to go. But I was really hoping to hang on to my brains. I really was.”

“One day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.”

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

“Look deeply into your disappointments, examine your heartache, interrogate your longing, probe your loneliness, meditate honestly on the elements of love of which you are still ignorant, and you will discover that the void within you is already filled with the desire for fulfillment. Your yearning itself is an internal guidance system that is moving you to become a lover.”

“all she wants is what she always wanted, only it’s getting further and further away.”

″‘That stuff about my father was true,’ Freak says, studying his fingernails and acting real cool again. ‘... I know he ran away because of me.‘”

″ ‘I am disappointed.” Marilyn’s head snaps up. ‘l thought you were different.’ What she means is: I thought you were better than other men. I thought you wanted better than that. ”

“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”

“You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.”

“I couldn’t understand why he was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese.”

“You can never put it back together like it was.”

“We’re both leftovers”

“I signed up to protect this country. I do not choose the wars. It happens that I love to fight. But I do not choose which battles I go to. Y’all send me to them. I had to wonder why these people weren’t protesting at their congressional offices or in Washington. Protesting the people who were ordered to protect them—let’s just say it put a bad taste in my mouth.”

“I had been rather pleased with my witticism when it had first come into my head, and I must confess I was slightly disappointed it had not been better received than it was.”

“All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile.”

“It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that’s what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where . . . where the disappointment doesn’t hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which . . . is in its own way a disappointment. But. There.”

“When you go through a disappointment, when you go through a loss, don’t stop on that page. Keep moving forward. There’s another chapter in front of you, but you have to be willing to walk into it.”

″‘See what a fine fisherman is my son! He will be a chief one of these days.’ Only Tavana Nui would be silent. His son had not gone.”

“It was obvious to everyone that Mafatu was useless upon the sea. He would never earn his proper place in the tribe. Stout Heart- how bitter the name must taste upon his father’s lips!”

“You really didn’t see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn’t it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.”

“He’s right. It’s cruel to give hope where none should be. It only turns into disappointment, resentment, rage—all the things that make this life more difficult than it already is.”

“McHarg, it is true, was a great man, a man famous throughout the world, a man who had now attained the highest pinnacle of success to which a writer could aspire. But on just this account his disillusionment and disappointment must have been so much the greater and the more crushing.”

“It was a disappointment that all men know —the artist most of all. The disappointment of reaching for the flower and having it fade the moment your fingers touch it.”

“Every little girl knows how dreadful it is to find a room empty where she thought somebody was.”

″‘...when I thought you weren’t here after all, I was so disappointed I couldn’t hide it, and I tried to meet all the girls and still make a choice, but I’m afraid I did a poor job of it.’ He glanced at Miri. ‘He did a stunning impression of a stone column,’ said Miri.”

“When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you..”

“How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?”

“I swear to God. Sometimes you men are complete idiots. We love you, and you just screw everything up.”

“I can’t stand the sight of them huddled together against the truth, deaf and dumb to anything remotely real.”

“My, what a greedy little trinity you are: king, king, king. Two of you must learn to live with disappointment.”

″ One of the most disappointing things that you, as a woman, could ever go through is falling in love with a man that can’t love you and respect you because he hasn’t learned to love and respect himself yet.”

“To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

“By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

“That’s one of the disappointments. I thought you’d meet interesting historical characters. But you don’t: they’re too far away. ”

″... we had taken his silence as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a disappointment to us, for it showed we had made no impression upon him... we knew then how the missionary must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it blighted.”

“There were so many things mingled in his expression--yearning, disappointment, and yes, love.”

“My father held Christopher’s little fingers protectively, proudly. As one of those memories that you capture and that remains unchanged through the years, the image of the two of them walking along in that night produced a surprising reaction in me that would come back every time I recalled it. What first flashed in my brain and my heart was--How come that couldn’t have been me? How come I never got a chance to do that? As time went on, I recognized that it wasn’t anger of course. But I was jealous of my little boy, ridiculous as that was. Below that layer, in the core of my being, was simple hurt.”

″‘He cannot, he simply cannot be my son,’ Lester said. He clutched his whiskers with his front paws and shook his head from side to side in despair.”

“Leonardo tried very hard to be scary.”

“My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like in plain, not much there to notice.

“It is no good wishing for what was not to be.”

“But still there was nothing.”

“What she did not want was the embarrassment of someone trying to make friends with her. It was easier to stay out of it from the beginning, rather than face the disappointment which inevitably followed.”

“He was not the same. The plane passing changed him, the disappointment cut him down and made him new.”

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment. ”

″‘Well,’ she says, ‘is he going to be an altar boy?’ ‘There’s no room for him.‘”

“He was born when I was six and was, from the outset, a disappointment.”

“If you wish for things you can’t possibly hope for, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

“People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

″‘I can’t even look at him,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t even bear to look at him.‘”

“Simon felt the duke’s rejection in his very bones, felt a peculiar kind of pain enter his body and creep around his heart. And, as hatred flooded his body and poured from his eyes, he made a solemn vow. If he couldn’t be the son his father wanted, then by God, he’d be the exact opposite…”

″Lord of the Sun! That I should have a grandson herding sheep! I, who have been such a warrior as men speak of round the fire for a hundred winters!”

“It was hard to beg humbly from a witch; and when she answered, ‘No, dear, I’m not going out this afternoon,’ harder still to conceal hot tears of rage- rage and disappointment.”

“And the five little Stigginses sat up in the big bed and howled horribly with disappointment.”

″...my life will be sour grapes and ashes without you.”

“It is well to pitch one’s expectations low, and so stave off disappointment.”

“For a man who had two religions - God and the land - he was dying a little each day, disappointed by them both.”

“It’s a beautiful building, but there’s something rotten at its heart. Now he’s discovered it he can smell the stench of it everywhere.”

I have been a disappointed man, and my spirits will not bear solitude.

They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.

He looked coldly into the eyes of the photograph and they answered coldly. Certainly they were pretty and the face itself was pretty. But he found something mean in it. Why was it so unconscious and ladylike? The composure of the eyes irritated him. They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. He thought of what Gallaher had said about rich Jewesses. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full they are of passion, of voluptuous longing!... Why had he married the eyes in the photograph?

During this dialogue the child had remained silent, her eyes roving from one to the other, all the animation fading out of her face. Suddenly she seemed to grasp the full meaning of what had been said. Dropping her precious carpet-bag she sprang forward a step and clasped her hands. “You don’t want me!” she cried. “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy!”

Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”

“What! My little book I was so fond of, and worked over, and meant to finish before Father got home? Have you really burned it?” said Jo, turning very pale, while her eyes kindled and her hands clutched Amy nervously.

“Disgusted, I dare say, and gone home as suddenly as he came. It’s nothing to me, of course, but I should think he would have come and bid us goodbye like a gentleman,” she said to herself, with a despairing look at the gate, as she put on her things for the customary walk one dull afternoon.

“Come,” said he to himself, “be a man. I am accustomed to adversity. I must not be cast down by the discovery that I have been deceived. What, then, would be the use of all I have suffered? The heart breaks when, after having been elated by flattering hopes, it sees all its illusions destroyed.”

“Why do you address me so coldly—so distantly?” asked the young Greek. “Have I by any means displeased you? Oh, if so, punish me as you will; but do not—do not speak to me in tones and manner so formal and constrained.”

“If he could come into the world this day and see the things that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with horror? Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love!

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing.

There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.

“I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life.

My clothes were rather a disappointment, of course. Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer’s expectation.

I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy in boots,—top boots,—in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the refuse of my washerwoman’s family), and had clothed him with a blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath I drew.

“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery, and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune, anything. There are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my secret, but another’s.”

“I’m speaking here on behalf of your parents and of your employer, and really must request a clear and immediate explanation. I am astonished, quite astonished. I thought I knew you as a calm and sensible person, and now you suddenly seem to be showing off with peculiar whims.”

By the door there was a dish filled with sweetened milk with little pieces of white bread floating in it. He was so pleased he almost laughed, as he was even hungrier than he had been that morning, and immediately dipped his head into the milk, nearly covering his eyes with it. But he soon drew his head back again in disappointment; not only did the pain in his tender left side make it difficult to eat the food—he was only able to eat if his whole body worked together as a snuffling whole—but the milk did not taste at all nice. Milk like this was normally his favourite drink, and his sister had certainly left it there for him because of that, but he turned, almost against his own will, away from the dish and crawled back into the centre of the room.

His disappointment at the failure of his plan, and perhaps also because he was weak from hunger, made it impossible for him to move. He was sure that everyone would turn on him any moment, and he waited.

And, hard though it be to crush her buoyant spirit, I must persevere in making her sad while I live, and leaving her solitary when I die.

“I feel the greatest regret at finding you in this situation,”

He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable.