Retrospect Quotes - Page 7

• Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Hands, Looks, Gone

  Christopher Hitchens (2017). “Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.94, Melville House

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• Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct.

  Carl Sagan

  Motivation, Self, Waiting

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.169, Ballantine Books

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• I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

  Tana French

  Noticing

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• Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Self, Easy, Righteousness

  "What would Andrew Jackson think of Donald Trump?" by Chris Cillizza, edition.cnn.com. May 2, 2017.

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• ...stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.

  Stephen King

  Two, Stupidity, Chance

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• When I was a teenager I felt like we were always being stereotyped as being really intense and dramatic and passionate and hopelessly romantic and excitable, now in retrospect I think I need to let you know those things are amazing. I hope you never lose those things.

  Taylor Swift

  Teenager, Thinking, Needs

  "Teen Choice Awards 2011: Taylor Swift Nabs Ultimate Choice Award" by Sophie Schillaci, www.hollywoodreporter.com. July 08, 2011.

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• In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

  John Green

  Book, Writing, Years

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• The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

  Robert James Waller

  August, Strange Places, Way

  The Bridge of Madison County (pp. 22-3)

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• In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

  Gloria Steinem

  Mother, Years, Twenties

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.211, Open Road Media

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• I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tightly interwoven fabric that was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared to now, when I am so rich and famous and so hated by the authorities in the capitol.

  Suzanne Collins

  Wish, Fabric, Fit

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.494, Scholastic Inc.

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• You’re the one who unleashed him. (Savitar) Yeah, well, let’s move on from the blame game. I was having suicidal thoughts and it seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, not so much. (Stryker)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Moving, Suicidal, Games

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2011). “One Silent Night”, p.75, Hachette UK

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• If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

  Paul Farmer

  Country, Should Have, Done

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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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• There are plenty of dead scientists I admire, but I can't think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.

  Stephen Hawking

  Thinking, Important, Scientist

  "Gods of science: Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox discuss mind over matter". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. September 10, 2010.

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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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• When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.

  Mary McCarthy

  Pain, Memories, Thinking

  "How I Grew". Book by Mary McCarthy, 1987.

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• In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations.

  Eleanor Robson Belmont

  Reflection, Past, Years

  Eleanor Robson Belmont (1957). “The Fabric of Memory”

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• People always understand everything in retrospect.

  Agnes Denes

  People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Hours, Found

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1975). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1848-1851”, p.168, Harvard University Press

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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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• The last of Summer is Delight -
  Deterred by Retrospect.
  'Tis Ecstasy's revealed Review -
  Enchantment's Syndicate.
  
  To meet it - nameless as it is -
  Without celestial Mail -
  Audacious as without a Knock
  To walk within the Veil.

  Emily Dickinson

  Summer, Enchantment, Delight

  Emily Dickinson, “The Last Of Summer Is Delight”

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• September's Baccalaureate A combination is Of Crickets - Crows - and Retrospects And a dissembling Breeze That hints without assuming - An Innuendo sear That makes the Heart put up its Fun And turn Philosopher.

  Emily Dickinson

  Fun, Heart, Crow

  Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller (2016). “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, p.516, Harvard University Press

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• I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.

  David Salle

  Photography, Ideas, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Vanity, Self

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• When I first heard about Y Combinator, it was one of those ideas that just seemed forehead-slappingly obvious. Good ideas often do, in retrospect.

  Mark Fletcher

  Ideas, Firsts, Obvious

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