Quotes About Expecting Something From Someone

“Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working-because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.”

— Jennifer Michael Hecht

“It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn't know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing - nothing comes of nothing - but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.”

— Adam Phillips

“I never trusted any man not to find someone else; to stay with me if he had another option. to not find something in me that would have him heading for the hills. that was the other reason for not thinking long-term- when someone walked out, as they invairiably did, it wasn't too big a shock. a disappointment but nothing, I hadn't been expecting.”

— Dorothy Koomson

“Just for today, i'll do something nice for someone who's not expecting it.”

— Tom Walsh

“I want my music to feel like I'm giving something to someone else and not that I'm expecting something back.”

— Kris Allen

“That's stupid." I stopped to look at him. "why would you want everyone assuming something that isn't true?"
"Why should I care?"
"So you can ask someone you're interested in to go to the dance with you," I replied, not expecting his lack of concern.
"I just did.”

— Rebecca Donovan

“Few things can make us feel crazier than expecting something from someone who has nothing to give.”

— Melody Beattie

“I saw them in the dark, the girls, the women yet to be found. I counted their faces, gave them names and said the names, as if calling a class register. Here's what I learnt from the clippings: that there is a pattern. These women had requested assistance. They'd told people: Someone is watching me, has been following me, has beaten me up before, has promised me he will kill me. They'd pointed their murderers out, and they had been told "It won't happen," or that nothing could be done, because of this and that, etc. I was jumpy in those days, expecting something terrible to happen to me at any moment, without knowing where it would happen to me, or why, or who would do it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

“The suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench;”

— Donna Tartt

“Look for opportunities to help someone else, but don't give expecting something in return. Give knowing that if we give we receive.”

— David

“Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only improvish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.”

— Dorothy Day

“Generosity is doing something for someone else expecting nothing in return.”

— Simon Sinek