Expectations Quotes

There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think 'This isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going.' Then I'd think 'Half the world has the same idea.

~ Stephen King

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

~ Douglas Adams

Excellence is the Result of Caring more than others think is Wise, Risking more than others think is Safe, Dreaming more than others think is Practical, and Expecting more than others think is Possible.

~ Ronnie Oldham

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Life was easier when you stopped caring, when you stopped expecting things to get better.

~ Cora Carmack

Expect everything so that nothing comes unexpected.

~ Norton Juster

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

~ Samuel Johnson

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

~ Gregory Maguire

No expectations mean there is no risk of disappointment.

~ Jude Morgan

You can devise all the plans in the world, but if you don’t welcome spontaneity; you will just disappoint yourself.

~ Abigail Biddinger

Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!

~ Georgette Heyer

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

~ Anthony Bourdain

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

~ Charles Babbage

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin

Be realistic with your expectations. I'd really like to cuddle a unicorn, but it aint going to happen.

~ India Knight

Nowadays, I dont have expectations, and this way she beats them all.

~ Jodi Picoult

I am afraid I shall disappoint people's expectations dreadfully.

~ Jude Morgan

Unhappiness lies in that gap between our talents and our expectations.

~ Sebastian Horsley

I believe we must do things in our lives for the right reasons, because we enjoy doing them, with no expectation of getting something back in return. Otherwise, we are constantly being disappointed. She moved her turquoise bracelet back and forth on her wrist. So I had two sons, John and Richard, because I wanted to, not because I thought they would rescue me in old age. I got out of all social organizations and clubs in my fifties so I could spend time with my grandchildren, not because they would give something back to Jack and me later on, but because that was what I wanted to do--and I have loved doing it. Believe me, these have been selfish decisions.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The trouble you're expecting never happens, it's always something that sneaks up the other way.

~ George R. Stewart

He expected too much from people, that was the problem, Ethan thought. He expected too much from life.

~ Anne Frasier

I've always liked rooms where the party hasn't started yet...I love the feeling that anything could happen. After the party, when anything already has happened, there's usually the inevitable fact to face that anything wasn't all you'd hoped it to be.

~ Jillian Lauren

The only things that I expect, are miracles.

~ Greg Dutilly

Meanwhile she's coldly interrogating me with her eyes. She's definitely in charge of this house and this moment. This must be Chloe.She escorts me to a table full of people and presents me. She introduces them briefly. This one's from Morocco, that one from Italy, he's Persian--I'm not exactly sure what that means--this one's from the UK. They're all in their twenties, poised and dismissive. They don't know or care who I'm supposed to be at home or where I went to school. They're measuring something else I can't see and don't understand.They nod and turn back to each other. They seem to be waiting for a cue from Chloe to release them from having to feign interest. She introduces herself at substantially more length. Her father is Chinese and her mother is Swiss; she grew up in Hong Kong and in Europe.I grew up in Michigan and in Michigan. But she didn't ask.

~ Kenneth Cain

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage.

~ Brien Piechos

they saythey only wantflowersto grow frommy mouth,so i willlook themdeadin theeyeas ishovesoft petalspastmy lips,chewwithmy jawcompletelyunhinged,& spitthemdownattheir feet-i will never be your expectations of me

~ Amanda Lovelace

Expectations. Strong belief something will happen in the future.Pressure. A motivator. A positive. An indicator you are in the right place.

~ Joe Maddon

Always fuck with people's expectations, sunshine. It's good for their circulation.

~ Tana French

Even if the heavy cloud fails to bring heavy rainfall, it cools the atmosphere

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Never expect anything from anyone, if you wants to live a happy life.

~ Rashid Jorvee

Never expect others to be like you, it can be the biggest nightmare!!! Collaboration and synchronization needs to be found in the difference

~ Harrish Sairaman

When you stop expecting miracles, life is the miracle.

~ Marty Rubin

Don’t help anybody’s expectation of you to grow. Don’t even give them a hint that you will fulfill it. Whatsoever suffering you pass through, be ready to pass through it, but don’t allow others to have expectations about you. Otherwise the world will close you in and there will be imprisonment. Once you nod yes to doing something, then you are closed in. You are in the tunnel already, and now with every step, every new act, you will fall into a new misery, new unfulfillment, new lies, new failures. Drop fulfilling others’ expectations, and drop expecting others to fulfill yours. Remember, if you suffer, you suffer because of you; if others suffer, they suffer because of them. Nobody suffers because of others – remember that deeply. Only then will you be able to be really sincere to your inner self; and that sincerity is religiousness.

~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

~ Chuck Klosterman

You can't beat your own expectations. The latter set the tone, and shape who you've become, and who you would end up becoming...

~ Assegid Habtewold

It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth.

~ Siri Hustvedt

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I used to have all of my ducks in a row. Now I'm happy to just have them in my vicinity.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

Don’t expect miracles why you have not done anything.

~ Sunday Adelaja

We tend to live down to other people’s expectations, especially the people closest to us. It is more difficult to obtain approval of people who hold us in high regard than to accept the lower standards that other people hold of us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster