#hindsight

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#humor #irony #shakespeare #humor

It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins. ↗

— Richard Paul Evans

#life

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#important #past #turning-points #wistful #dreams

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#life #life

How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it ↗

— Rasheed Ogunlaru

#conditioning #cultural-differences #foresight #hindsight #motivational-quotes

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#dull #first #get #had #hindsight

Whether it is successful or not is not the exercise for me. It is not up to me. It is out of my hands now. I am not going to in two years have hindsight and say I made a big mistake. ↗

— Vince Gill

#big #big mistake #exercise #going #hands

I once called the head of a network a liar. In hindsight, I should have called him an incompetent liar. ↗

— Steven Levitan

#head #him #hindsight #i #incompetent