concept

disappointment Quotes

78 of the best book quotes about disappointment
01
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“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.”
Maggie Stiefvater
author
The Raven Cycle
book
sadness
disappointment
longing
personal experiences
tricks
concepts
02
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“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.”
Mare Barrow
Kilorn Warren
Diana Farley
characters
03
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“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”
04
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“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.”
05
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“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.”
06
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“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.”
07
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“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.”
08
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“Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth.”
09
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“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.”
10
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“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.”
11
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“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.”
12
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“You can never put it back together like it was.”
13
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“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.”
14
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“We’re both leftovers”
15
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“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.”
16
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“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.”
17
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“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.”
18
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“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.”
19
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“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.”
20
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“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.”
21
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“All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile.”
22
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“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.”
23
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″ ‘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…”
24
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“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.”
25
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“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!”
26
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“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.”
27
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“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.”
28
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“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.”
29
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″‘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.”
30
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“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.”
31
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“I despise you and everything you stand for.”
32
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“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!”
33
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“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.”
34
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“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).”
35
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“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.”
36
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“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.”
37
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“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.”
38
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“Every little girl knows how dreadful it is to find a room empty where she thought somebody was.”
39
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“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.”
40
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“all she wants is what she always wanted, only it’s getting further and further away.”
41
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″‘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.‘”
42
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″ ‘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. ”
43
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“It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.”
44
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″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.″
45
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“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..”
46
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“How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?”
47
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“I swear to God. Sometimes you men are complete idiots. We love you, and you just screw everything up.”
48
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“I can’t stand the sight of them huddled together against the truth, deaf and dumb to anything remotely real.”
49
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″‘...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.”
50
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“My, what a greedy little trinity you are: king, king, king. Two of you must learn to live with disappointment.”
51
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“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.”
52
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″ 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.”
53
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“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
54
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“That’s one of the disappointments. I thought you’d meet interesting historical characters. But you don’t: they’re too far away. ”
55
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“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.”
56
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“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.”
57
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″... 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.”
58
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“There were so many things mingled in his expression--yearning, disappointment, and yes, love.”
59
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“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.”
60
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″‘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.”
61
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“Leonardo tried very hard to be scary.”
62
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“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.
63
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“It is no good wishing for what was not to be.”
64
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“But still there was nothing.”
65
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″...my life will be sour grapes and ashes without you.”
66
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“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.”
67
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“It is well to pitch one’s expectations low, and so stave off disappointment.”
68
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“He was not the same. The plane passing changed him, the disappointment cut him down and made him new.”
69
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“For a man who had two religions - God and the land - he was dying a little each day, disappointed by them both.”
70
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“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. ”
71
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“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.”
72
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“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.”
73
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″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!”
74
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″‘Well,’ she says, ‘is he going to be an altar boy?’ ‘There’s no room for him.‘”
75
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“He was born when I was six and was, from the outset, a disappointment.”
76
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“And the five little Stigginses sat up in the big bed and howled horribly with disappointment.”
77
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“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.”
78
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“If you wish for things you can’t possibly hope for, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

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