Expected Life Quotes

#1. Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Jim Woodring

#2. Even now, ten states away and half done with her, this Neal still thought she was better that he deserved. More than he'd ever expected life would give him.

Rainbow Rowell

#3. If everything turned out just the way everybody expected, life would be exceedingly dull, and learning in any useful sense simply would not occur.

Harrison Owen

#4. Somewhere along the way, I stopped living in the real world. I expected life to be like my books. I expected happily ever after out of every situation and when I didn't get it, I'd just read another book.

Nick Pageant

#5. I found myself when I least expected you- at the same old rocking chair in the room with the same flavor of tea. The only difference was the tea had turned cold, just as life had. And I found myself with an option. I could abandon this tea anytime and make a fresh one. You see?

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#6. The years roll on and life seems like this more and more, that choices don't really exit in the way I thought they would when I was a child and expected the regal power of adulthood to provide clarity and insight.

Scott Turow

#7. I am ever mindful of the legacy of my grandfather, the founder of this Kingdom, who had said to me that he perceived his life as a link in a continuous chain of those who served our nation and that he expected me to be a new and strong link in the same chain.

King Hussein I

#8. I am sure that no one coming to this ceremony expected a High Court judge to use the occasion to talk about that four-letter word, love. But that's a good thing. In life, never be predictable. It's so uncool.

Michael Kirby

#9. Our grandparents' generation never expected too much out of life and, paradoxically, were happier for it. It never occurred to my granddad that he would enjoy work. He hated it from the day he walked through the factory gates at 14 to when he left at 65.

Mark Barrowcliffe

#10. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Sally Armstrong

#11. She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view.

Lev Grossman

#12. People always arrive promptly at the places where they are expected.

Paulo Coelho

#13. It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be - even if it isn't what you expected.

Jim Butcher

#14. At first parenthood was as I had expected, exhausting, sometimes heinous, and occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow.

Kelly Corrigan

#15. It's been real weird. It wasn't how I expected my life to turn out. Especially, mainly pertaining to the show. It never crossed my mind that one day I'm gonna be big and famous and have my own TV show, you know?

Jack Osbourne

#16. Never settle up for something that is lesser than what you expected.

Anamika Mishra

#17. I had a moment a few years ago where I wasn't sure if I was acting for myself or because people expected it of me. A bit of a crisis of faith, I suppose. I did some soul-searching, took a break and decided I was going to live my life only for me.

Adelaide Kane

#18. I didn't take the decision [to get married] lightly. I ventured into it realistically. But life takes you places you wouldn't have expected. I'm really content with what was in the cards for me.

Mandy Moore

#19. The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.

Charlotte Bronte

#20. To help others to develop and succeed in life is a reward itself and only has value when nothing is expected in return.

Choi Hong Hi

#21. Your dreams may not be happening, and things aren't turning out the way you expected, but that doesn't mean your life is spinning out of control. It just means you're not in control.

Pete Wilson

#22. In my life, I had heard hundreds of coyotes and even more dogs, but never anything like this except in television shows. Wolves had been extirpated from the Northeast more than a century ago. Never in my life had I expected to hear them howling in the wild mountains of New England. ((c) 2016, p 239)

Paul Doiron

#23. Was often told what I should do. He expected honesty and integrity in all aspects of life, but I was also told to hold doors for women and children, to shake hands with a firm grip, to remember people's names, and to always give the customer a little more than expected.

Nicholas Sparks

#24. Every turning point in a person's life isn't reached by luck, they choose to be successful, they know what it takes to be there, they can do what is expected of them to do, they do not show trepidation about the requirements needed to be on top

Michael Bassey Johnson

#25. I think your 20s are the hardest part of life. I mean, everyone goes on about how hard it is to be a teenager, but actually I think it's tougher to be in your 20s because you're expected to be a grownup and expected to earn your own living and be successful and I think you feel like a kid still.

Nigel Cole

#26. Did you never think of children then? Ours?" His voice was thick with emotion. "I never expected in the whole of my life that God would be so generous as to give me you. I did not think to ask for more.

Deanna Raybourn

#27. He expected nothing more from life. Not because he was disappointed or embittered. He expected nothing because there was nothing of importance that he had not already experienced. He possessed all the happiness that a person could find. He loved and was loved. Unconditionally.

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#28. Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the bliss of satiation, even as his spirit starves. No, Pearl did not hate. Life was a negotiation between the expected and the unexpected. One made do. Draconus

Steven Erikson

#29. For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

Stewart O'Nan

#30. I'm thinking that it might actually be possible for things to work out sometimes. Definitely not everything and maybe not the way you imagined. But sometimes, when you least expected it, life surprises you.

Susane Colasanti

#31. Do not yearn to be popular; be exquisite. Do not desire to be famous; be loved. Do not take pride in being expected; be palpable, unmistakable.

C. JoyBell C.

#32. Life, weddings, relationships, road trips, gardening, making out, haircuts: few of the fun things in life always go as expected.

Ariel Meadow Stallings

#33. Life is stranger than any of us expected,
There is a somber, imponderable fate.
Enigma rules, and the heart has no certainty.

Richard Eberhart

#34. It was just a book. An inanimate object. The only power it held was what she chose to give it. It could only be important in her life if she made it such.
Of course, that didn't explain why she half expected it to glow in the dark every time she peered into her satchel.

Julia Quinn

#35. O, Life! how pleasant is thy morning,
Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning!
Cold pausing Caution's lesson scorning,
We frisk away,
Like schoolboys, at the expected warning,
To joy and play.

Robert Burns

#36. So this was it. You take a wrong step and you end up wearing yesterday's underwear, sitting on the carpet trying to teach yourself how to knit. And even that doesn't work. She never expected it to be so hard. Life.

Kate Jacobs

#37. Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind ... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.

Iain Banks

#38. you can plan so that nothing goes wrong in life. But something will, and it won't be what you expected to go wrong. So make sure you're with someone who will help you bail the water out of the boat, not someone who will blame you for the hole.

Kristin Billerbeck

#39. Whatever the choices one make in life, there will be the outcomes. But the question is: Will the outcomes be what one really expected?

Ezekiel Mosoatsi

#40. In life, it is never the big battle, the big moment, the big speech, the big election. That does not change things. What changes things is every day, getting up and rendering small acts of service and love beyond that what's expected of you or required of you.

Cory Booker

#41. The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.

Eugene H. Peterson

#42. Sometimes I arrive too early. I rush, and some people cling longer to life than expected.

Markus Zusak

#43. I feel like I don't have to win anymore. I've had a wonderful career. Tennis has given me so much, things I would have never expected in my life. I feel honored to even be a part of such a wonderful sport.

Serena Williams

#44. People think about life in terms of changes, not levels. They can be changes from the status quo or changes from what was expected, but whatever form they take, it is changes that make us happy or miserable.

Richard H. Thaler

#45. I don't know, I think that if I could just accept the fact that my life is supposed to be difficult. You know, that's what to be expected, then I might not get so pissed-off about it and I'll just be glad when something nice happens.

Jesse

#46. Today about 95% of the prescription drugs sold are Maintenance drugs-drugs that treat only the symptoms of a disease, and that you are expected to take for the rest of your life.

Paul Zane Pilzer

#47. If you have had the same dishwasher for 10 years or more, don't bother repairing it. The average dishwasher is expected to last nine years, and you've most likely squeezed as much life out of it as you can.

Jean Chatzky

#48. People saw what they expected to see. It was one of the basic truisms of life.

Julia Quinn

#49. My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

Steven Moffat

#50. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.

George Eliot

#51. We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

Andrzej Wajda

#52. But in the moonlight they were
little more than silhouettes. A reflection of her life. A
mere shadow of what she'd expected it to be.

Lorraine Heath

#53. I never expected her. Sometimes people sneak up on you and suddenly you don't know how you ever lived without them. How you went about your day and hung out with your friends and fucked other people without having this one important person in your life." Garrett Graham

Elle Kennedy

#54. One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.

K.L. Toth

#55. Was my life going to go on like this forever, totally uneventful? Alternating between unfulfilled expectations and expected disappointments?

Eva Heller

#56. Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

Douglas Coupland

#57. Sometimes life was hard, she thought, walking across the grass to be with her friends. Just when you least expected it, you had to start over. There was pain in that, but also satisfaction. With or without her wanting it to, life moved on. And she would, too.

Susan Mallery

#58. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

Joan Didion

#59. She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the equanimity of a weather forecaster.

Joyce Carol Oates

#60. I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

Rainbow Rowell

#61. The assault of our enemies is not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail, or any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#62. After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd actually made some sort of choice.

Tom Perrotta

#63. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.

Earl Warren

#64. She wondered then if she had ever been on the right track. She had been reticent all her life, because it turned out that her opinions were different from what others expected. 'That proves either that I am an exceptional idiot, or the reverse.

Nuruddin Farah

#65. Whenever Roosevelt (Theodore) expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested. For Roosevelt knew, all the leaders royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

Dale Carnegie

#66. Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! Remember that one: they are to be expected; two: they're the first and most essential part of the learning process; and three: feeling bad about them will prevent you from getting better.

Ray Dalio

#67. I think one of my biggest lessons so far in life is that hard work really does pay off. It may not culminate in the way you expected it to, but I have found that when I really put my head down and apply myself, I often get a good result.

Amanda Schull

#68. My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

Ruth Reichl

#69. I've had a good life, full of more success and happiness than I ever expected.

Maeve Binchy

#70. The last thing I would have ever expected to happen to me in my life would be that, in fact, I would be accused of doing something wrong and maybe even something criminal.

Kenneth Lay

#71. Good manners are the settled medium of social, as specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected for both.

Lord Chesterfield

#72. Never in my life would I have expected USDA to be opposed to farmers and ranchers.

Jerry Moran

#73. MEG (to Dante, the vampire):Vampires aren't as cool as I expected them to be. In romance novels, vampires are all dark and broody and sexy. In real life, you talk an awful lot about stocks.

Sophie Oak

#74. We weren't living the way we wanted because we weren't making the choices it required. Like so many in our generation of thirtysomething parents, we spoke of a slower, more intentional life, but we expected it to just happen.

Tsh Oxenreider

#75. I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.

Gunter Grass

#76. Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.

Michael J. Fox

#77. My mom and I used to listen to records, read, and take train rides across the country in the summer. It was a very chill life. She didn't expose me to anything that was ahead of my development, but she expected me to adjust to her world - she did not expect to adjust to mine.

Martha Plimpton

#78. Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

Alice Hoffman

#79. One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is.

Erma Bombeck

#80. Rachel expected that God would give her a second son, but she did not know that this would cost her her life. Many of us have done the same thing. We prayed for a particular matter without knowing what it would cost to have our prayer answered.

Witness Lee

#81. But when I do book signings and personal appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life.

George Pelecanos

#82. What I never expected is how much nothing there is afterwords. In life,, he was not nearby. Now he is everywhere I dream and every place I wake. Or if not him exactly, then a nothing so much like him I cannot seem to wish it goodnight.

Jim Moore

#83. I've been playing sexually aware women most of my life. At this point I expected to be playing moms and wives. It's exciting to play a femme fatale.

Kim Cattrall

#84. If you live your life only following the path you think is approved or acceptable, or the one you think is expected of you, you'll be making a huge mistake. Not a single successful person ... has ever done great things because they played it safe. You've got to be true to yourself.

Carson Kressley

#85. Psychologists were such voyeurs. They got off on true-life confessions, and then expected us to trust them. Not likely. Grabbing

Skye Warren

#86. Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.
[Stating how planets supporting life cannot be rare.]

Harold Urey

#87. With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

Arabella Weir

#88. Well, here we are," Ethan said. "The end of the world."

I smiled, turning slightly to take in the full view. "It's different to what I expected."

"The big stuff always is," he said.

Sarah Dessen

#89. Wasn't living your life based around what people thought and expected of you a little... well, stupid?

Kady Cross

#90. Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?

Amin Maalouf

#91. Only those who will love longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death rows most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy taste like to some. But there you have it.

Kate Lebo

#92. The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life what bells are to horses-not expected to draw the load, but only to jingle while the horses draw.

Henry Ward Beecher

#93. In breaking away from the familiar and the expected, you'll be forced and privileged to face greater challenges, learn harder lessons, and really get to know yourself.

Kelly Cutrone

#94. I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.

Rachel Friedman

#95. He had fled the claustrophobic confines of his family. He'd successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm's length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he'd slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's life as well.

Jon Krakauer

#96. I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

Huey Newton

#97. You come to realize that life is short, and you have to step up. Don't feel sorry for me. Much is expected of those who are strong.

Arthur Ashe

#98. The whole of my life I have relied on beauty first, brains second. It was expected, even requested. But you saw right through me from the start. You are the only man I've ever known who has looked beyond my face and wanted to know me for me. And I find myself wanting you to know the whole of me.

Kristen Callihan

#99. What if his ambitions was just a name he gave to a kind of conformity, and he was going back because he wasn't brave enough to live a life that wasn't expected of him, a life so far from any road that there wouldn't be any signposts or milestones?

Caleb Crain

#100. Just exactly what that good life was
the one I expected
I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.

Richard Ford