Michael Chabon Quotes

I'm not by nature a cynical person. But sometimes your expectations are different from reality.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.

I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed.

I believed, up to last week, that Adam was somehow coming back. But I wouldn't trade that optimism for anything, because the other option is no fun.

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

Get used to disappointment.

This is why you should never, ever get your hopes up. This is why you should see the glass as half empty. So when the whole thing spills, you aren’t as devastated.

I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

At first we hope too much and later on, not enough.

Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are low, it's easy to be pleasantly surprised. When they're not, we're vulnerable to painful disappointment. Because of this, many people spend a good deal of effort trying to avoid developing high hopes about anything.

Fame was not at all what it was cracked up to be, as far as I was concerned.

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.

Most of us...are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so that the effect of experience is continually to contract our hopes and aspirations

When we meet with better fare than was expected, the disappointment is overlooked even by the unscrupulous. When we meet with worse than was expected, philosophers alone know how to make it better.

I obviously hoped that everything that I found would make a difference. It ended up being way behind my wildest dreams.

I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.

Some disappointment is always the price of brave dreaming.

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

People expect too much. People who expect heaven always fall into hell - that is the law. Expect heaven and hell is certain. Don't expect heaven and there will never be any hell.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long in disappointment and bitterness at the closed door that we do not expectantly look for and therefore see with pleasure and gratitude the one which has been opened for us.

Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization.

Experience finds few of the scenes that lively hope designs.