Emma Donoghue Quotes

The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life

Once I wanted total happiness - now I will settle for a little less pain.

I think I probably hoped for it a little bit, but I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist... or maybe even a pessimist.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

If one cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.

I don't have any expectations.

I don't have high expectations anymore. Maybe they've just been beaten out of me.

I think by now I have made it fairly clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don't believe in people just hoping.

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it's also so disappointing and self-defeating.

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us from accepting reality.

Who you are is what you settle for, you know?

I just never count on anything. You can't.

You do the one film that you think is terrible, but it's a big studio film and you hope you'll get another job because of it, because blah blah blah, whatever it is. You know that you hate it, you just couldn't care less if it got made because it's not something in a million years you'd go and see yourself. And it ends up being shite and you just knew it was shite to begin with, and it doesn't do you any favors at all if someone thought you were in another shite film. So I decided it doesn't get me anywhere being cynical. It's not that I want to be.

You are what you settle for.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

You can't always get what you want.

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.

As I was saying to the landlord only this morning: 'You can't have everything'.

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.