Quotes about disappointment

Whenever I let the slightest thing make me forget myself, I can't help but be disappointed.

Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.

Nothing is ever what you want it to be. The harder you grab for it, the more deeply it cuts. And it mocks you for being foolish enough to reach for it at all. You come to fear touching anything at all, because you know that if you do, it will become terrible.

It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true.

Romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied, it anaesthesises them from the pain of their disordered second-rate lives [...] If romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied then surely nostalgia is the opiate of the disillusioned, for those who see all their dreams come true and find themselves living in a nightmare.

Like many a longed-for gift, it was, in possession, unwelcome.

What we want is not always what we get.

I never dreamed how quick the sweet would turn to sour.

You should have learned by now, none of us get the things we want.

We’ve unwittingly taught (children) a delusion—that things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.

Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

He who expects little is rarely disappointed.