Quotes about Expectations

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape, Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?

the things that she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.

For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a decent fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal.

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?

All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people's eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector's Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless's "afternoons".

It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

You never expected that God himself would, by his representatives, actually come close to unclean people and touch them. The Holy One is not human. The triune God is not human. Don't limit God's character by your expectations of what a decent human king might do. You expect God to reject; he accepts. You expect him to turn away; he turns toward.

But the point is that we live in a culture that idolizes happiness, and if we idolize happiness, it will always elude us.

When you have to manage the world, please everyone, earn more than you did last year, and work off five pounds, you will be driven. If not, you run the risk of being un-American or even un-Christian because our economy and churches rely on such people. Even when paralyzed by circumstances, a stressed person is a driven person.

What happens when people are raised on a steady diet of "You are great, you can do anything, you deserve it, you are the best, you can get what you want"? Sooner or later they find that they are not great, they can't do everything, they are not the best, and they can't control it all. Depression and denial are the only two options left.