Retrospect Quotes - Page 3

• That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Writing, Versions

  Chuck Palahniuk (2004). “Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories”, NY Books

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• The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

  Walt Whitman

  Time, Dark, Past

  1871 Passage to India, opening verse.

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• I try not to go back in retrospect and say oh, I shouldn't have done this or shouldn't have done that. You make your decisions and you live by them.

  Tim Burton

  Decision, Trying, Done

  Source: www.chud.com

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• You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

  Haruki Murakami

  Fall, Light, Color

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• History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Ends, Knows, Written

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• And there's always retrospect to light a clearer path.

  Emily Saliers

  Light, Path

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• Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Perspective, Continuity, Visible

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.223, Grove Press

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• Success is terrifying. Like happiness, it is often appreciated in retrospect. It's only later that you place it in perspective. Years from now, I'll look back and say, ‘God, wasn't it wonderful.’

  Julie Andrews

  Years, Perspective, Looks

  This Week, September 18, 1966.

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• It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

  Donna Tartt

  Morning, Past, Discovery

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.88, Vintage

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• Those of us who have come to years of discretion and more, must often take to retrospect, and seek to appraise the outcome of our lives.

  Learned Hand

  Maturity, Years, Outcomes

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• He wanted us to play whatever we played in the most characteristic and appropriate style. Even it was the theme from 'The Godfather,' you needed to play that then the way that a Hollywood producer would expect it to be played. Whether it was that or the posthorn solo from Mahler's Symphony No. 3, he would expect that to be played in the way that Leonard Bernstein wanted to hear it. In retrospect, I think it was a sensational way to teach this particular group of students. By the time you graduated you could absolutely read anything with any trumpet.

  Manny Laureano

  Thinking, Play, Symphony

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• In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

  Kim Gordon

  Fashion, Class, Icons

  Kim Gordon (2015). “Girl in a Band”, p.113, Faber & Faber

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• In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

  Kate Morton

  Becoming, Realising, Seems

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• Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.

  Madeleine M. Kunin

  War, Iraq, Vietnam

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• Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.

  Phillip Lopate

  Humility, Writing, Forever

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• And then the work bears a strong sense of leave-taking for me personally. It ends the work I began in the 1960s (paintings from black-and-white photographs), with a compressed summation that precludes any possible continuation. And so it is a leave-taking from thoughts and feelings of my own on a very basic level. Not that this is a deliberate act, of course; it is a quasi-automatic sequence of disintegration and reformation which I can perceive, as always, only in retrospect.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Strong, Black And White

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• It was not until some weeks later that I realized there is no need to restrict oneself to 2 by 2 matrices. One could go on to 4 by 4 matrices, and the problem is then easily soluable. In retrospect, it seems strange that one can be so much held up over such an elementary point. The resulting wave equation for the electron turned out to be very successful. It led to correct values for the spin and the magnetic moment. This was quite unexpected. The work all followed from a study of pretty mathematics, without any thought being given to these physical properties of the electron.

  Paul Dirac

  Successful, Discovery, Goes On

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• In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.

  Richard Holbrooke

  Decision, Pitfalls, Triumph

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• It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Loss, Thinking, Iran

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• History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not.

  Jeanne C. Stein

  People

  Jeanne C. Stein (2013). “Blood Bond”, Penguin

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• You know, 'Peepshow,' in retrospect that seems like a good fit for me, but in the beginning, I'm sure you remember, nobody was sure if the show was going to last. Everybody was like, 'What are you doing? You can't sing, and you can't dance. What are you doing in this show?

  Holly Madison

  Doing You, Lasts, Remember

  "Holly Madison talks family, career and casting decisions as she ends ‘Peepshow’ run". Interview with John Katsilometes, lasvegassun.com. October 23, 2012.

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• I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.

  Randall Munroe

  Jobs, Old Job, Virginia

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• Eventually we will find (mostly in retrospect, of course) that we can be very grateful to those people who have made life most difficult for us.

  Ayya Khema

  Gratitude, Grateful, People

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• History's villains are more easily recognized in retrospect. In an article published in 1935 and reprinted in 1937, Winston Churchill expressed a curious ambivalence towards the German chancellor prior to the outbreak of war: We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation. . . .

  Winston Churchill

  War, Men, Civilization

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• Success comes from having a fulfilling experience and being inside the moment of that experience. Success does not come in retrospect or as a recollection or even as an evaluation from others. lt's not something that you can physically hold onto or repeat at will. Only when you acknowledge the special moments can you truly feel the effects of your most wonderful achievements.

  Tommy Tune

  Achievement, Ballet, Special

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