Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm further off from heaven Than when I was a boy.
Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable.
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.
My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.
I peaked early. I was told I'd missed my boat.
I've been an idiot to think that real life could have a happy ending
It is important for children to understand that some of the disappointment their parents feel for them is often really the parents' disappointment in their own lives.
I don't want to suggest that matrimony was necessarily a tragic affair - some of our neighbours' marriages seemed quite functional, if somewhat routine; nevertheless, in the workaday world, it is wedlock that is most likely to offer the occasion for life-threatening disappointment.
sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy
In my experience, women are conditioned to expect and accept that life will not only let them down, but they themselves will be the reason for their own downfall in the fullness of time.
Happily ever after?" "If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.
I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
I think, for myself, life lied to me.
Life was like a batch of biscuits without the baking powder: flat, flat, flat.
For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think.
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
In 'The Big Chill,' those characters are in middle age, thinking, 'Oh, God, I've turned into my parents. I've failed.' And in 'Beside Still Waters,' we're showing the struggles of people who actually want to be like their parents and feel they can't live up to their heights.
