Looking Back Quotes

Looking back, you can romanticize the things you did back then. I also like talking about the stupid things I've done. ~ Walter Martin

For all of my success, in looking back I couldn't identify a moment when, at core, I had felt fully at home with myself. My ~ Scott Turow

The first time I made myself up, I was looking at my reflection in the mirror and it wasn't me looking back. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do as myself. I found out how powerful that was and how much that can mean to an actor. ~ Rick Baker

Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza.
"Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival."
"So ... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass. ~ Iain Banks

Looking back on it, could there possible have been a more confusing acronym for trying to keep kids from experimenting with drugs than DARE?
"Kids, we're here today to DARE you not to do drugs! We DARE you to accept our DARE!"
"Office, does that mean you want us not to do drugs, or to do drugs?"
"We DARE you not to do drugs!"
"But I thought we weren't supposed to do things We're dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I should do that, right?"
"It's just an acronym, son."
"What is an acronym? ~ Mike Birbiglia

There are some moments in man's life that looking back might cause him fall into the precipice! At those moments, man must just look forward! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I asked him once why he wanted to see the sun rise every morning, what it was that caused him to be out here at the crack of dawn every day.
He watched me for a moment before looking back at the horizon. "Its beauty," he said. "It reminds me every day that there is beauty in the world. That even though it may feel like we are alone sometimes, we are never truly alone. ~ T.J. Klune

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war. ~ Iris Chang

I'm tipping the hat and looking back. ~ Robert Plant

Looking back now, thinking about that moment in the lights, with my heart pounding, Oscar in my hand, all I can say is I am grateful and humbled - still to this day. Next to marrying my husband and the birth of my children, it is one of the best days ever. ~ Marlee Matlin

The experience of redemption is to see differently in looking back," Reinders observes. "It is hindsight. ~ Anonymous

Live your life like you are 80 years old looking back on your teenage years ~ Taylor Swift

Look at your neck turning radius. Its designed to look 180 deg forward side only.
Looking back slows you down. Always look forward in life. ~ Manoj Arora

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything
for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes. ~ Alice Sebold

My wife Margaret is the best thing that's ever happened to me. ~ Ryne Sandberg

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. ~ Milan Kundera

Many people try to avoid looking back. To be sure, there is a wrong way to look back; it is wrong to look back at past sins and failures and defeats. That can only make you fail even more today. But it is good to look back to see where we have been and what the Lord has done in us and through us. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. ~ Paul Murray

Looking back, I'm almost happy I lost that fight. Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal. ~ Max Schmeling

I'm glad that my journey has been gradual and slow, instead of instant, because that allowed me to grow and discover who I am before I was thrown into the world. I'm happy I didn't start acting professionally as a kid/teen; looking back, I don't think I was ready. ~ Jade Hassoune

I asked him if he was leaving anyone behind. He said he'd met a girl with stardust on her robe, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw the universe looking back. ~ Ilona Andrews

Isn't there something in Genesis about not looking back? A stupid glance over my shoulder showed her expression relaxing, glad I wasn't taking anything that couldn't be replaced and glad I didn't destroy anything that couldn't be repaired. "Do you care for me, Georgia?" I asked her. "Tell me you don't and I'm out of your life forever." She stood in the driveway with her arms wrapped around herself like she was freezing. "Andre is on his way."
"I didn't ask you about no Andre."
"He'll be here in a minute."
My head hurt, but I pressed her. "It's a yes-or-no question."
"Can we talk when Andre gets back? We can-"
"Stop talking about him. I want to know if you love me."
"Andre…"
She said his name one time too many. For what happened next, she would have to take some of the blame. I asked her a simple question and she refused to give me a simple answer. I turned from her and made a sharp left turn, pounding across the yard, feeling the dry grass crunch under my shoes. Six long strides put me at the base of the massive tree. I touched the rough bark, an instant of reflection, to give Old Hickey the benefit of the doubt. But in reality, a hickory tree was a useless hunk of wood. Tall, and that's all. To break the shell of a hickory nut, you needed a hammer and an act of Congress, and even then you needed a screwdriver to get at the meat, which was about as tasty as a clod of limestone. Nobody would ever mourn a hickory tree except Celestial, and m ~ Tayari Jones

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. ~ Wong May

This I would wish, that there was no time or sleep. No more past, or future, and everything we did was good the first time, for the day. Without the need of looking back to learn from the past, and no future to hope for the better. No more tiredness, or having a need to dream, and no nightmares to fear. If there was a second time, this is how I would like to start over. ~ Anthony Liccione

They're looking for you," she told him. "I heard it on the radio."

"They better be careful," he said, without looking back at her. "They might find me. ~ Joe Hill

I remember the first time I walked on that stage. Maxine and I were just a duet at the time, and we walked on that stage and did 'Looking Back to See.' Ernest Tubb introduced us at the time. I remember my knees were shaking. ~ Jim Ed Brown

I'd always wanted to grow my hair out. And now looking back on those photos I understand why I probably shouldn't have ... ~ David Cook

I know I'll miss her every single day, but the memories she left won't haunt me anymore. I'll remember the girl who never wore shoes, and our blood promise to always be friends. I'll remember girls who loved and trusted each other, protected each other, and sometimes even hurt each other.
I'll remember a friendship that will never go away. ~ Jennifer Shaw Wolf

Looking back on it, I realize that it might not have been the completely right thing to do. Unfortunately, the rental market in San Francisco sometimes requires that you overlook trivial things like having a serial killer for a landlord. ~ Darren McKeeman

Will you call me?" she asked helplessly. "Will you call me again, Evan?"

"Well of course I will," he said, looking back to smile at her in a way that would soon become habitual: a mixture of pity, fond teasing, and readiness for love. ~ Richard Yates

No person ever died that had a family. ~ Ray Bradbury

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. ~ Douglas Coupland

Every moment is precious, even the ones behind me that I often reflect upon with a reserved smile. However ... I seldom look back, only forward in anticipation of the next greater now. ~ Carl Henegan

I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Sometimes, with autobiographies, it turns into a bit of score-settling. And looking back, I don't feel the way I did then, and you kind of grow up and let it go behind you. ~ Marc Almond

Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts. Instead, we lowered our voices, thinking the battle was over, and with this reticence we hurt ourselves. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest. ~ Alec Soth

Too much looking backward ... is bad for progress. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally. ~ Franz Kafka

Looking back at that moment, I understand that I had lived in books so long, in my narrow university setting, that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium-one of the wonders of history-my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward, to expand with it outward, the way this enormous interior swelled upward and outward. My heart swelled with it... ~ Elizabeth Kostova

Looking back on my life, now that I'm an adult, I've seen so many places and met so many people that it sometimes seems there's nothing left to explore. My one regret, however, is never growing any real roots anywhere. It's the one experience I've never had: to find somewhere I belong and learn to fit in. ~ Stephanie Haddad

Amazing, Heather thought, looking back at the email message. Who was this incredible, gifted person? ~ Mike Wells

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. ~ Frederick Buechner

He sat there looking at her smiling and laughing, watching her hair fall over her eyes and she setting it back behind her ear, He turned away bowed his head down and smiled himself looking back at the sky. ~ Akshay Vasu

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead. ~ Suzy Menkes

When they'd first come out in the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea. ~ Dennis Lehane

Things aren't perfect. They are far, far from it,but they are getting there, and I wasn't looking back. Not when there were so many good things in the future. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Looking back on the production of 'Nevermind,' I'm embarrassed by it now. It's closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record. ~ Kurt Cobain

It became increasingly clear that my fellow Christians didn't want to listen to me, or grieve with me, or walk down this frightening road with me. They wanted to fix me. They wanted to wind me up like an old-fashioned toy and send me back to the fold with a painted smile on my face and tiny cymbals in my hands. Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own. ~ Rachel Held Evans

After my dad started making duck calls, he'd leave town for a few days, driving all over Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas trying to sell them. He left me in charge of the fishing operation. I was only a teenager, but it was my responsibility to check almost eighty hoop nets three times a week. Looking back now, it was pretty dangerous work for a teenager on the river, especially since I'd never done it alone. If you fell out of the boat and into the river, chances were you might drown if something went wrong and you were alone. But I was determined to prove to my father that I could do it, so I left the house one morning and spent all day on the river. I checked every one of our hoop nets and brought a mound of fish back to Kay to take to market. I was so proud of myself for pulling it off without anyone's help!
When Dad came home a couple of days later, Mom told him about the fish I'd caught and how much money we'd made. I could see the smile on his face. But then he went outside to check his boat and noticed that a paddle was missing. Instead of saying, "Good job, son," he yelled at me for losing a paddle! I couldn't believe he was scolding me over a stupid oar! I'd worked from daylight to dusk and earned enough money for my family to buy a dozen paddles! Where was the gratitude?
I was so mad that I jumped in the boat and headed to the nets to see if I could find the missing paddle. After checking about seventy nets, I was resigned to the fact that it w ~ Jase Robertson

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision. ~ Denis Johnson

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own. ~ Salman Rushdie

Often the deep valleys of our PRESENT will be UNDERSTOOD only by LOOKING BACK on them from the mountains of our FUTURE experience. Often we can't see the LORD'S HAND in our lives until long after the trials have passed. Often the most difficult times of our lives are ESSENTIAL building blocks that form the FOUNDATION of our CHARACTER and pave the way to FUTURE opportunity, understanding, and happiness. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey. ~ Franz Kafka

Jace. This can't happen." I closed my eyes, thinking it would be easier to say without him looking back at me. But it wasn't. "This isn't about us. I can't leave Marc. ~ Rachel Vincent

If you keep looking back, you'll never be able to move forward. You're the only one who can stop yourself from your own success. ~ B.A. Gabrielle

Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday? ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left. ~ Cassandra Clare

There's nothing I want to relive - certainly not youth - and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I watch my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do; even their sleeping is wholehearted. They aren't waiting for a better tomorrow, or looking back at their glory days. Following their example, I'm trying to stick to the present. I'm not stranded here, I know where I've been; I can conjure up details of old haunts, even former states of mind. ~ Abigail Thomas

They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way. ~ John Milton

Looking back, it is also the smallest moments that seem to radiate the most pain. The moments when you realize you loved these people, helplessly, that you were given no choice in this matter of loving them, and that they will always be part of you no matter how you try to carve them out of your flesh. That you are tied to them with bonds you could never sever, that they will live on inside you no matter how many effigies of them you hang and burn, no matter how often their reflections appear in the eyes of other men and women, men and women who then unwittingly play the roles of father and mother, with whom you act out the drama again and again. ~ Evelyn Lau

If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul. ~ Kim Hyesoon

I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that's the work of time and my looking back. ~ Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

It was more than disappointment, but I gained from it. I learned from it. I leaned into it to step out of it. You learn from different perspectives and to be given the chance to grasp them is beautiful. ~ Dominic Riccitello

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future. ~ Jennifer Egan

And one of the things she had learned early in her life
was that if you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn
more about it. If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and
in many ways that was worse than finding out you were wrong in the first place. Because if you
were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and
wondering what might have been ~ Nicholas Sparks

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things. ~ Wendell Berry

I read once that we're all just dead stars looking back up to the sky, because everything we're made of, even the hemoglobin in our blood, comes from the moment before a star dies. ~ Robyn Schneider

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. ~ Adrienne Rich

Happy those early days when I Shined in my Angel-infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back (at that short space) Could see a glimpse of His bright face. When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity. ~ Henry Vaughan

I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write. ~ Lois Lowry

The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, With emotion, to the man I used to be. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. ~ George Orwell

Looking back at my earlier pictures, I think that the work is very much coming from the same place. I have gone through a period of challenging myself with a complicated idea to currently challenging myself with the idea of simplicity. ~ Tim Walker

Sometimes we make decisions that seem right at the time, but later, looking back, were clearly a mistake. ~ Jill Santopolo

I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back. ~ Edwin Morgan

We are very used to imagining that we see a three-dimensional world when we look around ourselves. But is this really true? If we keep in mind that what we see is the result of photons impinging on our eyes, it is possible to imagine our view of the world in quite a different way. Look around and imagine that you see each object as a consequence of photons having just travelled from it to you. Each object you see is the result of a process by which information travelled to you in the shape of a collection of photons. The farther away the object is, the longer it took the photons to travel to you. So when you look around you do not see space-instead, you are looking back through the history of the universe. What you are seeing is a slice through the history of the world. Everything you see is a bit of information brought to you by a process which is a small part of that history. ~ Lee Smolin

He acts like he's in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn't know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be. ~ Sorin Suciu

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? ~ Saidiya V. Hartman

A racial community provides not only a sense of identity, that luxury of looking into another's face and seeing yourself reflected back, but a sense of security and support. ~ Wentworth Miller

Sometimes, you need the ocean light,
and colors you've never seen before
painted through an evening sky.

Sometimes you need your God
to be a simple invitation
not a telling word of wisdom.

Sometimes you need only the first shyness
that comes from being shown things
far beyond your understanding,

so that you can fly and become free
by being still and by being still here.

And then there are times you want to be
brought to ground by touch
and touch alone.

To know those arms around you
and to make your home in the world
just by being wanted.

To see eyes looking back at you,
as eyes should see you at last,

seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen,
seeing you, as you yourself
had always wanted to see the world. ~ David Whyte

Was now the time to look forward to the doom of parting, and stop looking back at the doom of meeting? ~ Eudora Welty

I suppose looking back on life, anyone's life, it amounts to this – everything that diverges from one's aim is a bloody waste of time, except as respite making you less lonely. ~ Louis Zukofsky

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation. ~ Charles Frazier

Getting up from the table, shaking a little at her unraveling, Ari cuffed Charlie across the head. "Be nice."
"Tell him to be nice!"
"I can't," she snorted, looking back over her shoulder at them. "If I did that he'd actually have to be nice… it would be like re-writing his entire personality."
Jai grunted. "Funny. ~ Samantha Young

I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that ~ Charles Dickens

Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second. ~ Pete Wentz

Now his response was merely to detach himself from personal contact. Looking back, she could not remember a conversation veering on the intimate from which he had not withdrawn immediately. He had had of course, in the past, more than enough of being devoured alive by the consuming interest of his admirers. A boy called Will Scott, back in Scotland. An Archer, they said, called Robin Stewart. Jerott, perhaps, long ago. Small wonder that Francis Crawford today took routine precautions to repel invaders.

And of course, that was it. Standing there, her eyes blank in the fog, Philippa saw plainly so much which had escaped her. The dismissals she had suffered; the exchanges he had broken off; the measures he took, when he remembered, to dampen the ardour of any impressionable fool who might dream of clinging to him.

Such as herself. She remembered the ringed, picturesque hands on which she had fixed her eyes, and their abrupt withdrawal. It was not only in the eyes of the world that her pursuit of Lymond was being put down to a blossoming schoolgirl devotion. Warily, Lymond himself had considered it time to start taking precautions. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

When I look in the mirror, I don't see my Dad, I see my grandmother. For a while it was my mother looking back at me. If only it was my Dad. ~ Colin Firth

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed. ~ Hugh Hefner

She'd once thought God would never intentionally hurt her. But looking back over her life, she'd had cause to rethink that. She was certain nothing touched her life that didn't first filter through the loving hands of her heavenly father. But she was also convinced that God sometimes wounded, in order to bind up. And that He shattered, so that His hands could heal. This was part of His inheritance she'd overlooked before, but never would again. ~ Tamera Alexander

I caught professer ryan or as I call him beautiful face looking back at me with desire in his eyes as if I had just been naked and fingering my sex. ~ Brit Gosik

Smiling, she answered, "You can't mean that! Why there are people who would give an arm and a leg to be a decorated Kobani." She started to turn away but stopped. Looking back she added, "Oh, right... You already did that." She laughed as she walked out. ~ Stephen W. Bennett

Looking back, I think I was always musical. My dad was very musical, and I think my mom was musical. ~ Paul McCartney

This is a story of almost unimaginable tragedy. Indigenous people looking back on five centuries since the European invasion began to know what comes after the end of the world. Their ancestors' lives and culture were ended due to war, disease, and starvation. The impact of colonization continues to influence Indigenous peoples' lives. Over the past several hundred years, their lands, resources, and livelihoods have been taken away or destroyed. With few ways to make a living and to feel purpose and a connection to the world at large, they struggle to create thriving and healthy communities. ~ Eldon Yellowhorn

As an old man ... looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about ... is suffering, affliction. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

It's funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can't put back together and wouldn't want to even if you could. ~ Rebecca Harris

I didn't look back. Sometimes, not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show. ~ Seanan McGuire

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her. But, looking back on it now, I know that I was in love with Mrs Dempster. Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things. Furthermore, I felt myself tied to her by the certainty that I was responsible for her straying wits, the disorder of her marriage, and the frail body of the child who was her great delight in life. I had made her what she was, and in such circumstances I must hate her or love her. In a mode that was far too demanding for my age or experience, I loved her. ~ Robertson Davies

I'm sorry for losing my temper following the race, but after a day or two of looking back at the race it's easy to realize that it's just not that big of a deal compared with what the people of the Gulf Coast are still going through. ~ Robby Gordon