Life's Disappointments Quotes

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

That's what the majority of people in the world do, they walk among the ruins of their life. Things that didn't work out, relationships that went sour, jobs that disappeared. All they can think about is their ruins, and when you focus on that you can't build a new you.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

Even when your dream that you set out comes true, it's not always perfect, and there isn't always the kiss at the end, and we all get to live happily ever after. That's not the reality of life.

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

The baseball held was my fantasy of what life offered.

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.

Whatever expectations I had for myself, none of them have come to pass. I grew up thinking I was going to be an actor, which I am. But I thought I'd be a very serious sort of Shakespearean guy going from town to town having sex with various Juliets all over the country.

Not everyone gets a happily every after. Life is real and sometimes it's ugly and you just have to learn how to cope.

Tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

I've been an idiot to think that real life could have a happy ending

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

Somehow, something is always suffering. Someone is always losing out somehow. If you pick one kid up, you're not picking the other one up. You just try to minimize those small let-downs because, in a way, life is a series of let-downs from everyone, all the time. We don't mean it, but it happens. So, I just try to minimize that and spread them wide.

There is really no end to life's little humiliations.

Apparently, the world is not a wish granting factory.

Presents can make up for some of the disappointments that life doles out, such as it makes almost no sense and is coming to an end more quickly than ever.

The reason we feel hurt and anger when things and people outside us let us down is because we believe those things and people shouldn't. Well, sorry, that's not life here on earth.

Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day. The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up. The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power. The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different. The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees. In the end they all died.

How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get? All those plans we make...what happens to them? It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close.