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.
You don't seem mad at all,' she said. But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?
You can't expect everyone to have the same dedication as you.
Jake: It's a long story, something about the violation of expectations and a crushing loss of faith, and love, and life, and art. Bill: So it's a girl? Jake: Yes. Bill: I've had a little bit of girl trouble myself lately. But it is better to have loved and lost, am I right? Jake: She was a unique constellation of attributes; she was my Halley's comet. But the universe is designed to break your heart, right? Bill: A philosopher as well as an artist, yes, it is we who suffer most. Jake: Yes, with the possible exception of the victims of violent crime
[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)
...I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.
When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
Walter: Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it.
Joey: Look, I know you're hurtin' now, but in time you'll realize what you've achieved. Jimmy Rabbitte: I've achieved nothing! Joey: You're missin' the point. The success of the band was irrelevant - you raised their expectations of life, you lifted their horizons. Sure we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way it's poetry.
Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life...
In a word, I was too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for myself.
...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work. (Sandy, in THE CRAZY HORSE ELECTRIC GAME)
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.
President Andrew Shepherd: You're attracted to me, but the idea of physical intimacy is uncomfortable because you only know me as the President. But it's not always going to be that way, and the reason I know that is there was a moment last night when you were with ME, not the President. And I know what a big step that was for you. So, Sydney, I'm in no rush. Here's my plan. We're going to slow down, and when you're comfortable, that's when it's going to happen. [Sydney emerges from the bathroom wearing nothing but one of his shirts] President Andrew Shepherd: Perhaps I didn't properly explain the fundamentals of the slowdown plan. Sydney Ellen Wade: [feeling the bed] No, you explained it great. President Andrew Shepherd: Are you nervous? Sydney Ellen Wade: No. President Andrew Shepherd: Good. My nervousness exists on... several levels. Number one, and this is in no particular order, I haven't done this in a pretty long time. Number two, uh, any expectations that you might have, given the fact that I'm... you know... Sydney Ellen Wade: [approaching seductively] The most powerful man in the world? President Andrew Shepherd: Exactly, thank you. I think it's important you remember that's a political distinction that comes with the office. I mean, if, uh, Eisenhower were here instead of me, he'd be dead by now... and number three... Sydney Ellen Wade: Andy... [she kisses him]
Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.
Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made--that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day....Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.
Mary: I may have made a mistake but that is no reason to patronize me. It is dismaying that your expectations are based on the performance of a lesser primate, and also revelatory of a managerial style which is sadly lacking. Is it any wonder then that I've chosen not to learn the intricacies of an antiquated and idiotic system [grunt] Mary: i think not! Judy Lindendorf: Re-code it! Mary: Fuck you! Judy Lindendorf: Re-code it! Mary: If you had really loved my mother, you wouldn't treat me like this.
Get used to disappointment.
You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.
Kyle: Rich daddy equals expectations. Expectations are like a fungal rot on a marriage. Tom: Our marriage is not going to have a 'fungal rot'. Kyle: Unless she finds out you slaughtered her dog! [laughs, then stops, seeing Tom's expression] Kyle: Oh, don't worry, I'll take that to my grave.
What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.
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?
I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep my expectations.
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.
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.
If you expect nothing from anybody, you
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
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