Quotes about Expectations

Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

Be a good girl, she said. I hope you'll be a good sister to Laura. I know you try to be. I nodded. I didn't know what to say. I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around? Surely my mother loved Laura more than she loved me.

I felt confused, and also inadequate; whatever he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. this was the first time a man would expect more from me than i was capable of giving, but it wouldn't be the last.

I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex's feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

In Tin's already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.

Free love," Aunt Beatrice said scornfully. "It's never free. There's always a price.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It's nature's way. It's God's device. It's the way things are.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

I only look at her as a mother, and she doesn't succeed in being that to me.

My parents are pleased, but they're not like other parents when it comes to grades. They never worry about report cards, good or bad. As long as I'm healthy and happy and don't talk back too much, they're satisfied. If these three things are all right, everything else will take care of itself.

I have in my mind's eye an image of what a perfect mother and wife should be; and in her whom I must call "Mother" I find no trace of that image.