[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commo...nly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Expecting me to grovel, she carefully covers both feet... with the hem of her skirt. She pretends to hide a coming smile and won't look straight at me. When I talk to her, she chats with her friend in cross tones. Even this slim girl's rising anger delights me, let alone her deep love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the t...hing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn't seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting m...ore novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ...ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Age wins and one must learn to grow old.... I must learn to walk this long unlovely wintry way, looking for spectacles, shunning t...he cruel looking-glass, laughing at my clumsiness before others mistakenly condole, not expecting gallantry yet disappointed to receive none, apprehending every ache of shaft of pain, alive to blinding flashes of mortality, unarmed, totally vulnerable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I grew up confidently expecting to have a profession and earn my own living, and also confidently expecting to be married and have... children. It was fifty-fifty with me. I was just as passionately determined to have children as I was to have a career. And my mother was the triumphant answer to all doubts as to the success of this double role. From my earliest memory she had more than half supported the family and yet she was supremely a mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappoint...ed when anything is less than best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without s...leep, the day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »