expectations Quotes

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”

“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”

“Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.”

“There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.”

“Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”

“Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going.”

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.

“When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.”

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

“I think the reason Uncle had originally been so strict with Father was that he thought of Father as his spiritual son. He hoped that Windrider would be everything that Uncle had once wished Black Dog to be. And like any parent with a child, Uncle was hurt and angry when Windrider did not behave as Uncle wanted. But then, with Dragonwings, Uncle came to accept the fact that he was not always right.”

“And she would be married, and to Giddon. She would be his wife, the lady of his house. She’d be charged with entertaining his wretched guests. Expected to hire and dismiss his servants, based on their skill with a pastry, or some such nonsense. Expected to bear him children, and stay at home to love them. She would go to bed at night, Giddon’s bed, and lie with a man who considered a scratch to her face an affront to his person. A man who thought himself her protector—her protector when she could outduel him if she used a toothpick to his sword.”

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case.

“For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin? The hospital shielded us from all sorts of things. We’d tell the staff to refuse phone calls or visits from anyone we didn’t want to talk to, including our parents.”

“Everything I ever thought has turned out different.”

“Most folks think you start to be a real adult when you’re fifteen or sixteen years old, but that’s not true, it really starts when you’re around six. It’s at six that grown folks don’t think you’re a cute little kid anymore, they talk to you and expect that you understand everything they mean.”

“Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.”

“If you have the expectation that I have to be a certain way, then I feel the obligation to be that way. The truth is I am bot what you want me to be. When I am honest and I am what I am, you are already hurt, you are mad. Then I lie to you, because I’m afraid of your judgment. I am afraid you are going to blame me, find me guilty, and punish me.”

“‘That was a tough year. I wasn’t liked at all,’ he later said. ‘I demanded they do better, so I made a lot of enemies.’”

“In the track of fear we have so many conditions, expectations, and obligations that we create a lot of rules just to protect ourselves against emotional pain, when the truth is that there shouldn’t be any rules. These rules affect the quality of the channels of communication between us, because when we are afraid, we lie.”

“We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens.”

“Everybody is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we’re all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. ‘Look at my worry. Worry with me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.‘” Gram sighed.”

“Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles – he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father . . . Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.”

“I have no choice,” he said again. “It’s like a dynasty. If the son doesn’t take the father’s place, the dynasty falls apart. The people expect me to be their rabbi. My family has been their rabbi for six generations now.”

″‘Aspen, I know you could do it. But you’re not a superhero. You can’t expect to be able to provide everything for everyone you love.‘”

“Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one rood and it ain’t always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter.”

“I wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone in this whole world. I wouldn’t hurt them physically or emotionally, how then can people so consistently do it to me? Even my parents treat me like I’m stupid and inferior and ever short. I guess I’ll never measure up to anyone’s expectations. I surely don’t measure up to what I’d like to be.”

“Knowing what to expect next gives children a sense of security.”

“You don’t want that ... You think you do.”

“‘Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?’ said the King. ‘That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.‘”

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Mia said suddenly. “I think you can’t imagine. Why anyone would choose a different life from the one you’ve got. Why anyone might want something other than a big house with a big lawn, a fancy car, a job in an office. Why anyone would choose anything different than what you’d choose.”

“Yet to this day she regretted not having completed the course and received her diploma—“just to prove”—as she had told a friend, “that I once succeeded at something.” Instead, she had met and married Herb […].”

“Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet in all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps.”

“Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents— low level, but what can you expect?”

“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.”

“The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

“Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”

“Expectation wasn’t just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself.”

“I was done with trying to fit into everyone’s preconceived box of who I was supposed to be.”

“So much of who I was had become lost, diluted, fragmented. I was being pulled and stretched in every which way, dragged in a million directions with the expectations of the world sitting heavy on my center like a concrete paperweight I couldn’t shake off.”

“The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.”

“We will do what others expect of us . . . If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. lf they expect us to go to jail, then that’s where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.”

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for their father’s mistakes....”

“Nothing shocked them anymore. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life . . . He himself had not yet come to that, he did not want to come to it.”

“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

“Be patient and live with the knowledge that all you are searching for is certain to come if you prepare for it and expect it.”

“We promise according to our expectations and we want according to our fears.”

“They get so curious. It’s like they have this idea of me, and whenever I step outside of that, it blows their minds. There’s something so embarrassing about that in a way I can’t even describe.”

“When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.”

“The fact is, that men expect from education, what education cannot give.”

“I now lived within a fire of unsatisfied long, of tense expectancy that often drove me completely wild.”

“I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. ”

“Don’t expect me to give up everything.”

“Giving with strings of secret expectations attached is the greatest invitation to heartbreak.”

“Everybody has laws he lives by, I expect. I have mine as well.”

″[Oscar] [h]ad none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. [..] Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks.”

“In September he headed to Rutgers New Brunswick, his mother gave him a hundred dollars and his first kiss in five years, his tío [uncle] a box of condoms: Use them all, he said, and then added: On girls. ”

“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty’s dead.”

“It was the first time I’d ever shaken hands like a man. It made me feel big and solemn and important in a way I’d never felt before.”

“If you can count to ten, you can count to ten thousand”

“The straight path must sometimes be crooked.”

“It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.”

“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.

“‘I don’t know what Arks, I mean Mr Robertson, expects of me.’ ‘That you do your best. That’s all anybody expects of you. Do your best and he’ll be happy as Larry.’”

“Ben gave me a. . . It has a little brush. I like making pictures with it!”

“She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.”

“After that, eery morning, Noah said to Happy, ‘Hello Happy.’ He said it many times, but Happy just looked at Noah and wagged his tail.”

″...the guy knows people expect him to underperform, which triggers severe test anxiety that causes him to underperform.”

“It was the custom that when a clockmaker’s apprentice finished his period of service, he made a new figure for the great clock of Glockenheim. ‘So we’re to have a new piece of clockwork in the tower! Well, I look forward to seeing it tomorrow.’ ‘I remember when my apprenticeship came to an end’, said Herr Ringelmann, ‘I couldn’t sleep for thinking about what would happen when my figure come out of the clock. Supposing, I hadn’t counted the cogs properly? Supposing the spring was too stiff?’ ”

″‘Anyway, I’m Li’l Don. Everybody expected me to join.’ ‘Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?’ Mr. Wyatt asks. ‘However, it can roll away from the tree. It simply need a little push.‘”

“Lara found it difficult to know just what to say. Here they were in the hot sun on the verandah of the school principal’s house - her long-lost father, this tall angular man with his piercing blue eyes, and her beloved teacher. Both of them standing and looking at her and expecting a reply of some kind. But she could only stare dumbly at this total stranger, who was nevertheless her only family now. Her father.”

“We’re more than our mistakes. We’re more than what people expect of us.”

“The principle is simply this: We tend to get what we expect—both from ourselves and from others. When we expect more, we tend to get more; when we expect less, we tend to get less.”

“Erica stayed at the window and wondered about the surprise. It was only half a surprise now, because she knew it was coming, but she was glad in a way of the warning.”

“That’s how it was now. A storm gathered, yet the sky was clear. Lightning was expected, yet there was no cloud.”

″‘Because my price is higher. And so are His expectations of me. I have spoken before of His blessings, Pagan. Now I see the way clear. This is the chance I have been given to repay Him for his loving kindness, without the shedding of blood-”

“I haven’t the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake.”

“Even those with fewer freedoms still face countless daily choices about which urges to indulge, what actions they’ll take, what they’ll accept or demand from themselves.”

″...people often choose to expect the worst of an upcoming experience in hopes of creating a more favorable contrast between their expectations and reality.”

“Your gardeners do not understand their business: but what can you expect of men whose fathers were cobblers and carpenters? How should they have learned to cultivate your garden?”

“I’m asking you to try working for a change. At your age I was working hard, not floundering around in a fool’s dream world.”

“A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”

“Everything must, in one way or another, go. One does what one is wound to do. It is expected of me that I walk up and down in front of my house; it is expected of you that you drink tea. And it is expected of this young mouse that he go out into the world with his father and dance in a circle.”

Ten-year-old Jenny’s new foster mother doesn’t live up to her expectations until Jenny discovers that there are more important things in life than lavish gifts and fancy homes.

“Laura Fielder’s hair is so short she looks just like a boy; she doesn’t give Jenny lavish presents; she doesn’t live in a fancy house. But gradually Jenny learns that Laura has more to give than just presents and cookies.”

“My full name is Cadence Sinclair Eastman, and contrary to the expectations of the beautiful family in which I was raised, I am an arsonist. A visionary, a heroine, a rebel. The kind of person who changes history.”

“Stellaluna behaved as a good bird should.”

“A party for Me?” thought Pooh to himself. “How grand!” And he began to wonder if all the other animals would know that it was a special Pooh Party, and if Christopher Robin had told them about The Floating Bear and the Brain of Pooh and all the wonderful ships he had invented and sailed on, and he began to think how awful it would be if everybody had forgotten about it, and nobody quite knew what the party was for; and the more he thought like this, the more the party got muddled in his mind, like a dream when nothing goes right. And the dream began to sing itself over in his head until it became a sort of song.

“My dear Watson,” he said, “you aren’t supposed to be as clever as this.”

“What shall we do with that girl? She never will behave like a young lady.”

“I understand. Queens of society can’t get on without money, so you mean to make a good match, and start in that way? Quite right and proper, as the world goes, but it sounds odd from the lips of one of your mother’s girls.”

“The boy has been a good boy here, and that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no other and no more.”

“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”

I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.

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.

“You are to understand, first, that it is the request of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being encumbered with that easy condition.”

“We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”

“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.” “That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds. And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?” “How could I do otherwise!” “Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Undoubtedly.” “You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this day, in earnest of your expectations. ”

“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets; there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood ‘uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no. We’ll show ‘em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”

“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.”