Unspoken Expectations Quotes

When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word.

If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business.

At Cambridge, it was the weirdest culture. Everyone pretended they didn't do any work, yet it was so competitive.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don't.

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

When I go to Ohio to visit relatives on holidays, I am often astonished by the level of casual dismissal offered up by way of discussion.

Why don't women say what they want, why wait to be asked? Do women intuit that it is unacceptable to appear ambitious?

People tend to say, 'You're not as fat or as ugly as I expected.' I never know how to reply. It's a bit of a slap, but they don't mean it, I'm sure.

We don't want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

I have got friends that I have got to know and found out that, the first few times I was with them, they were just thinking that everything I was doing was some kind of weird mind game, which is hysterical, really, because I couldn't be any less like that.

If you're truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don't finish sentences. They don't say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people's ideas.

My daughter is in more competition with me. I never wanted to be bigger than my mother or to challenge her.

No one ever said that I couldn't create my own projects, but no one actually told me that I could be an executive producer, either.

Zimbabweans, I've come to believe, we are very passive-aggressive people. We don't like conflict; we don't like confrontation, so we find all sorts of ways of avoiding that conflict and confrontation. We are not allowed to talk about bad things that go on in families.

Perhaps he wanted to be alone with Dr. G., who was here, but he should have let me know. At Hoffmann's I felt I was sitting on hot coals, expecting him to arrive every moment.

I started to think about the assumptions we make that everyone we meet operates under the same moral code, and how betrayed we feel when that isn't the case.

We all run the risk of thinking that people have common sense sometimes.

Even before my parents died, I felt all the responsibility to my family. I don't know why. In any business, any relationship, if something goes wrong, I feel I am to blame. It's something inside me.

I think watching my mom gave me great inspiration, I wish that had been reinforced more verbally. It would have kept me from a lot of pain.

It's quite ironic I suppose, it's that thing about being in a group when you all start out as friends and then invariably end up hating each other. So I just thought they needed telling really, in case they were labouring under the apprehension that they were still friends.

In the dating game, the world is difficult because people don't communicate, or they communicate, but then their actions speak louder than words.

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.

I was invited to a dinner party by an ex, and I was convinced that he wanted to rekindle our relationship. I prohibited my friends from coming with me because I didn't want to make it awkward for them when he professed his love to me.

It wasn't that I was shy to go out with him, I just didn't want people with preconceived notions to assume anything about why we were together. I was pretty careful for a while.

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.