Managing Expectations Quotes

“Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing – that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls – it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness’ sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad – let it be both.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Never underestimate the stories people tell themselves about how much better someone else’s life is.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations

“The solution to a problem is never commensurate with the size of the problem.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I think again of that thing no one tells you about birth—that as your body offers up your child to the outside world, your very first job as a mother is to let go. I really never thought about the fact that that gift, if you’re lucky, needs to be returned in kind.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Exiting through the doors of the hospital feels like stepping from inside into another inside. There is no stepping outside this experience, I feel quite clearly that I am still in the room with Mum, even as I stand in the rain. We are hermetically sealed into this other reality; we don’t leave it until it’s really time to go. Until the door appears. I think about the Helen Keller quote we only ever say part of, When one door closes, another one opens. That’s what we all say; the actual quote is: When one door of happiness closes another one opens but we often look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. I walk down the street in my bubble; amazing to be in two places at once. When the door opens I think, I will try to keep looking at it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I’m sorry, darling. What are you sorry about? Being a shit mother. This is something she has said and worried about my whole adult life. Sometimes she makes herself a victim of the thought and sometimes it carries a deep plea for forgiveness. I had always been exasperated by the statement and felt it asked me to repeatedly qualify that there had been shit moments of selfishness that accompany any human, mother or not, but that she, in all honesty, was not a shit mother. There are clearly certain thoughts that keep playing through a life, though, like songs on repeat. They are for you, and you alone and however much you try to involve other people in them, they really have nothing to do with anyone but yourself. Here, in whatever end-of-life moment we are in, it is suddenly necessary to lay those thoughts to rest. Take the stylus off the record, delete the playlist. There’s nothing to be sorry about, Mum. So what if you were, what if it were true? Does it matter? Because here we are together, talking . . . together. I love you and more than that, I know I love you, and I see who we are together—we laugh a lot, you are who I want to call when things are bad or good or interesting. So how can you being a shit mother really be something that carries any weight in terms of what it did to me, your child?—It didn’t. Which makes me think you weren’t, or at least, not entirely. She has fallen asleep, but she is smiling. I think even though it was a bit of a ramble, I made a good point. In making it, I realize I absolutely mean it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“No one tells you how birth and death are so closely aligned. Here, lying in the dark, I see it: pain, a journey that goes toward only one thing and the deep need to have someone with you to hold on to. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the “end”—never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops. Infinite human experience of beginning and ending, so deeply connected, only one instilling fear. I am not frightened anymore. We are on an adventure, and this is not some eleventh-hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination. We are together, this person who was my portal into life. This rare, funny, independent creature who would do the same for me: walk with me as far as she could and then wave me off with love, safe in the knowledge that life had equipped me with everything I needed to meet death as the newest of my many experiences.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“It’s all a decision. You just decide, and then you do something. You don’t have to know everything, but you do have to begin. Make gravy you don’t remember, live while you’re dying, fight the unassailable.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Mum’s voice gets higher as she grips my hand and relives the same awful details again and again. I do what she would have done, back when I was small and outraged, red-faced with some unfairness or pain, caught in the eddy of my story. Shhh, shhhh, it’s done. It’s done. We are here. You are all right. Breathe. I know it was terrible. I am here. The pieces of parenting she gifted me, without knowing, are pieces of her. Now they are me. Maybe it’s not roles being reversed but rather a relay race that goes round like a story, a happier story. Softly, the light changes outside. Fresh nurses relieve tired ones; the thread of meticulous kindness is picked up. Mum sleeps.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Do you think men can change?” “Of course they can,” he said very gently. “But I think it might be misguided to base your happiness on them changing, particularly if you have seen their lack of change played out for a long time, with no apparent evolution.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“In a way, it was the perfect vengeance to wreak on a cheating lover; yoked to their deeds and betrayal, they drag those things on into the next version of their life and relationships, hopefully feeling like there’s never quite enough room to exist comfortably next to them, always having to manage a pinch of compression. The abandoned is gifted with emptiness. No secrets or remains to awkwardly accommodate, and once the ash is swept, a clear offering to a new beginning. I had questions, though.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Maybe, I thought, I just needed a force who had a job that didn’t disappear like a mirage every few months. I realized I was that force and for the hundredth time in my life thought about finding another career. This thought dissipated the larger I grew, however, subsumed by the physical job at hand. Filled with hormones and heat, I felt the superpower of creation, and without dismissing sperm as one of its vital components, person-building inside your own body is a one-woman show. I felt invincible, which became the remedy to my fear and saw me pacing around my house late at night looking at my stuff and verbally auctioning everything off for the baby while explaining that we could live off the proceeds for a fairly good amount of time and not worry.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I didn’t mind putting on weight; it was shape-shifting, and becoming the legitimate identity of a mother made me suddenly feel more credible as a human. Most of the time, being pregnant, I felt like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, and sometimes like some gentle, bovine creature—large and constantly eating.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“It was very peaceful until an actress I vaguely recognized started wailing about being fat. “Oh, you’re not fat, you’re pregnant,” cooed a few of the other women. “How am I ever going to get cast in anything when I’ve got a giant ass and a baby?” She was pretty and blond, but her petulant shaming of her body was disfiguring.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“In the bath, there could have been a eureka moment of clarity, a soulful call to acknowledge the journey instead of fixating on the destination, but I only felt the existential dread I’d woken up with—that coquettish desire and Bible-thumping resolution were gone.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“It is NOT unfair, it is just LIFE,” she said, squeezing my arm emphatically on the words “NOT” and “LIFE.” “It is sad and ridiculous, and it is amazing and to be celebrated. That is it. Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing—that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls—it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad—let it be both.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“But isn’t a person supposed to be kinda more . . . whole? Don’t you think I might start making bad decisions if it’s just one little disconnected piece making the decision?”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Kathleen Turner’s”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Lauren Bacall.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“The thing about being someone else for a living is that you (the actual person you are) run the risk of being discarded in favor of the shiny new mantle you are paid to step into. It offers a real possibility of having yourself described not just by the characters you play, but also by the inattention to your inner self. It felt dangerous and delicious to think of never having to excavate my own inner landscape in favor of ephemera.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I dunno about reincarnation, but I do know that we live many lives in this one.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“What was bad, I thought, as I walked back down Brewer Street, was the appearance of this line that would always be there. I could choose to cross or not cross, but either action would have practical and moral consequences. You speak up—they won’t hire you. You don’t speak up—you actually feel the good part of you begin to erode.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I looked at the tall man through the rearview mirror—newly heroic and cheerfully crushed into my tiny car—and I knew that I loved him. Hot on the heels of this realization was the accompanying acknowledgment that it did not take a great deal for me to fall in love. Being defended, considerateness, a train door held open, making room on a crowded pub bench—these things regularly not only triggered my devotion, they also were watertight assurances of my lifelong happiness with this new stranger. The thing was, I was completely aware of how nuts it was to feel a whole life together on the back of a kind word, but it never stopped me from falling in love. As a truly terrible person I once fell in love with said when I told him I first loved him after he’d given me a lift home: “That’s not just nuts, it’s also crazy.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Later, when I had been shot out of the cannon into fame, I would see that it is a trope returned to by journalist after journalist. It has a strange queasy effect, reading something about yourself that is absolutely true but is presented as a fault: “She is tall and thin and eats very little for lunch.” “Her teeth are always bared when she smiles.” “None of her relationships has lasted more than a year.” I often wondered why they use truth as an assault when there were more devastating weapons available. Before social media offered a platform to do so, I wanted so many times to rejoin: “Don’t you realize how unimaginative and toothless it is to call me what I am? You’d really do far more damage sneering at me for what I’m not—for all the things I have tried so hard to be and have so far failed at. Honestly, ask me like, three questions about myself and I’ll give you proper ammo for a more interesting assassination.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Truth as invective has always puzzled me.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“No, getting lost in whatever you’re personally going through at the expense of your performance. Use it, don’t telegraph it.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I suddenly realized that circumstances are not weight-bearing. They do not create a structure upon which to safely build your life. Circumstances can change in an instant. And that shifting can stop plans from manifesting. My plan was now just an idea that apparently had run its course. So what was I supposed to do now that I’d done everything I thought I was supposed to do?”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“I wonder if, when teaching something as ephemeral as acting, you have to do this, and that building a scaffold around a muse is how you tether yourself to her. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize how much of what they taught was mulled with this secret knowledge, only relayed in the last moments of their teaching: That for all your adherence to discipline, your observance of the rules of iambic pentameter and how to sit down while wearing a sword without crushing your balls—the chances of you making a living as an actor are cadaverously slim.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy

“Women sit on the edge with their legs dangling in the water while their children scream “MOM! Watch THIS” and then proceed to perform no particular feat beyond splashing around, illustrating something I have always known, which is that 90 percent of good parenting is bearing witness.”
― Minnie Driver, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays – A Poignant Collection of Personal Stories on Acting, Failure, and Motherhood's Joy