Misaligned Expectations Quotes

I thought I had swell ideas, and wonderful musicians, but the hell of it, no one else did.

Nothing really ever happens like you imagine it will.

My parents thought they were getting an accountant and a lawyer. Instead, they ended up with a PR and an actress.

The problems in life come when we're sowing one thing and expecting to reap something entirely different.

I've definitely had those moments when I think a relationship with somebody is one way, and then it just flips.

How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.

We've always imagined ourselves as a rock band. We've always been a rock band playing the wrong instruments.

Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications. Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

If a train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s simply because it’s not your train. Don’t try to flag down the conductor and convince them to stop there, even if their own map says that they should just keep going. You may not realize it, but there’s another train trying to come toward you, unable to get into your station because a train that doesn’t even belong there is being delayed there by your intensity.

But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren't what people wanted to hear.

If what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected.

Sometimes you see things in a script, and it doesn't necessarily mean the director sees the same things. And if you think you're going to be making a different film, then that's not gonna work.

If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in sixteenth-century Spain, which is already going through secularization, industrialization, modernization. He goes out to kill a giant, and instead he collides with this huge windmill and injures himself and also damages the windmill. I think that's a metaphor for the collisions we all have over time, as our ideas of ourselves get out of synch with the historical moment.