Reality Vs Expectations Quotes

“The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not."

"I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve."

"But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I don't think she's had much of a life."

"Well, a life is a life."

"What does that mean?"

"One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she'd realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“I couldn't understand; cheating was the one thing I'd told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren't an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Slapping someone in real life is not like slapping someone in the movies. There is no victory or empowerment or dramatic romantic tension in it. A slap in real life just leaves your fingers burning and the lingering truth that something is irreversibly wrong.”
― Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk