anticipation

And I will never again underestimate the power of anticipation. There is no better boost in the present than an invitation into the future.

What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.

...the way a man might hesitate before he kissed a woman, to gauge her reaction, to see how he would be received. Perhaps he would hesitate to prolong the moment, that ideal moment of anticipation, sometimes better than kiss itself.

It's as if I've stepped off the edge of a cliff, and even though my heart's in my mouth and my stomach is in knots, I'm the most excited I've ever been in my life. I'm totally enthralled by him. I want him, every part of him, and I desperately want him to feel the same way about me.

Hope meets a dead end when the only chance in sight comes to naught.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

I would not anticipate the relish of any happiness, nor feel the weight of any misery, before it actually arrives.

Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work's important, family's important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming.

Don't anticipate for a promise, let it be an unexpected favour, this will increase your power of independence.

... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they__e lost, forever.

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more and more heightened and imagined, thus anticipation is increased. This kind of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of a Cheeto and we want them to eat the whole bag.

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

He ran his finger along my jawline and down my neck. "The wait will be fun, but it's not going to be easy.

Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.

I felt like I was an arrow, pulled back and ready to be launched into something big.

Oh the places you'll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.

Would that we could choose the last image we see before death closes our eyes forever to this world.