Ann Brashares Quotes

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

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

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Everybody has a good idea, but nothing goes as planned.

I think the moment you're convinced something's going to be good is the moment that it's not going to be.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.

Disappointment results from the removal of illusion.

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.

Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

I know so many who have married in the full expectation and confidence of some one particular advantage in the connection, or accomplishment, or good quality in the person, who have found themselves entirely deceived, and been obliged to put up with exactly the reverse. What is this but a take in?

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

People are disappointed that you aren't exactly who they thought you were, as opposed to somebody who's just walking around trying to get some laundry done.

Storybook endings never appear. They're just 'someone's' way of leading us here.

The promise of change doesn't always mean something changes.

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

Be prepared for negative responses sometimes. It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's just sometimes you're not the right look, or you're not really what they were envisioning.

Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

Expectations are just disappointments waiting to happen.

People look to the future for salvation, but the future never arrives.

Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality.

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

Expectation brings frustration. Private ambitions bring failures.