Road Not Taken Quotes

Being thankful to the road not taken, ... because only right things at right time give uh pleasure and success. ~ Lovely Goyal

I was wondering aimlessly; too many road were open ... too many resolves, too complex, allowed of being taken. I took ... by far the simplest of them all. ~ Edmond Rostand

I read this forward and knew i'd love the book.

This book is for you.
The men & women, lost & lonely, searching & wary, uncertain & ill prepared for what the heart can lead them into.
Sometimes, love is right around the corner. Its the road not taken that has suddenly intersected with that congested road of life you're traveling, bringing you to a harsh & sudden stop.
It's a look. It's a smile thhat warms you to the depths of your soul, steals your breath, and pulls you aside as that moment in time screams to a halt & leaves you struggling to adjust.
It's the love you didn't expect.
It's the love you didn't ask for, hadn't thought aobut, & you realize it's the love that heals the wounds in your soul.
It's the love that will reveal the person you are, & the life, though never perfect, that you never knew you dreamed of.
Call it destiny, call it fate. Or call it a gift from God.
Whichever, its the dream & the everlasting hope for the future. ~ Lora Leigh

When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on". ~ Fred Rogers

Seize every opportunity along the way, for how sad it would be if the road you chose became the road not taken. ~ Robert Breault

You are someone else's road not taken ~ Adam Copeland

The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led. ~ Lisa Wingate

I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost. ~ Steven R. McQueen

When you are at the end of the road, turn around and take another road. I promise it will be less painful. ~ Debasish Mridha

No one is discontented at not being a king except a discrowned king ... unhappiness almost invariably indicates the existence of a road not taken, a talent undeveloped, a self not recognized. ~ Blaise Pascal

He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn't see it anymore. ~ Ann Brashares

I often wished that I could split myself a hundred ways and live a hundred separate lives [ ... ]. But in the end, I supposed, we only had one life to lead, and the roads not taken would always outnumber and outshine the roads we end up taking, day by day, without plan. ~ Davy Rothbart

It's my purgatory, really, inner drinks, whatever. I'm never really all that interested, but I find myself telling her how beautiful she is anyway. 'Cause it's true, all women are, in one way or another. You know, there's always something about every damn one of you, it's a smile, a curve, a secret. You ladies really are the most amazing creatures, my life's work. But then there's the morning after, a hangover, and the realization that I'm not quite as available as I thought I was the night before. And then she's gone, and I'm haunted by yet another road not taken. ~ Gina Fattore

I think all of us, looking back on our careers and our lives, there'll probably be a "road not taken" that we'll regret and mourn. Certainly, artists will always feel that way, especially when the path taken was more commercial than the one not taken. ~ Liz Garbus

I regret less the road not taken than my all-fired hurry along the road I took. ~ Robert Breault

One always wonders about roads not taken. ~ Warren Christopher

But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it - it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber. ~ Andre Aciman

There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate ~ Salman Rushdie

When we forgive we are telling God that we have faith in him to fight our injustices. It might not seem possible when you are standing in a storm, but when you take the high road you can see farther than you can now. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Ultimately, success is not measured by first-place prizes. It's measured by the road you have traveled: how you have dealt with the challenge and the stumbling blocks you've encountered along the way. ~ Nicole Haislett

When I came to Delhi first and said, "This is not India. And then I was taken to Varanasi and there I loved, loved the culture. It was a beautiful journey. The way the people dressed - even the poorest people, and the fabrics! With vegetable dyes, and I was fascinated by the color.But in the end I loved the men - all in white - so many shades of white. And I said, "What am I going to do? A color collection or a white collection?" I finally did a neutral white collection. ~ Donna Karan

I have taken care of everything in the course of my life, only not for death, and now I have to die completely unprepared. ~ Cesare Borgia

It is a lonely programme. The very virtues you cultivate become walls that inevitably separate you from your kind ... A new danger comes to your soul, and intolerance and impatience with those who are as you have been all but destroy that which you have taken such pains to build up. Not alone are there spiritual barriers between you and the friends that you have, but your business training has made your mind incisive. In the swift rush of business you have no time for small debates and petty dilemmas. ~ Alice Foote MacDougall

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead. ~ William Maxwell

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm. ~ Virginie Despentes

If the road is easy, it's probably easy because it's not a road and you're not on it. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers. ~ Milan Kundera

Now, on the subject of deterrence, I admit that there can be little doubt that as presently administered in the United States, the death penalty is not a general deterrent to murder in many, if not most, situations. . . .

But of one thing I am certain: it is, by God, a specific deterrent. No one who has been executed has ever taken another innocent life. And until such time as we really mean it as a society when we say 'imprisonment for life,' I, and the families of countless victims, would sleep better at night knowing there is no chance that the worst of these killers will ever again be able to prey on others. Even then, I personally believe that if you choose to take another human life, you ought to be prepared to pay with your own. ~ John E. Douglas

You always miss a great player, but I think the players on this team have taken a lot of pride in overcoming obstatcles when we have a player down ? not only the offensive players, but the defensive players. We were very fortunate that we played that well. ~ Bobby Petrino

On the other hand, the conditions of human existence - life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth - can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences - anthropology, psychology, biology, etc. - which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. 2 ~ Hannah Arendt

I have always liked to get my pictures taken, and I like taking care of my looks. But, I am not one to use beauty products and treatments. ~ Vijender Singh

We live our lives by the water and if you don't know how to swim in Australia, it's like not knowing how to cross a road. It's an incredible survival thing that you really must learn when you're a child. ~ Eric Bana

Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The ~ Fuchsia Dunlop

People do not want more noise in their social media streams. They want entertainment, uplifting conversations, and products that last. Most importantly, they want to be taken seriously. ~ Cendrine Marrouat

One study proved just how powerful exercise can be: Three groups of depressed patients were assigned to different coping strategies - one group took antidepressant medication, one group exercised for 45 minutes three times a week, and one group did a combination of both.33 After four months, all three groups experienced similar improvements in happiness. The very fact that exercise proved just as helpful as anti-depressants is remarkable, but the story doesn't end here. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent! In short, physical activity is not just an incredibly powerful mood lifter, but a long-lasting one. ~ Shawn Achor

On one occasion, when he was about to be taken from the interrogation room, he thought he was going to be shot. His knees buckled and he cried out in a pleading voice: "I have not told you everything yet".

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 44 ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

I sleep equally well in a soft bed or on the grass beside the road. If I am given food and shelter, fine. If not, I'm just as happy. Many times I am given shelter by total strangers. When hospitality is not available there are always bus depots, railroad stations and all night truck stops ... When no shelter is available to me, I sleep in the fields or by the side of the road with God to guard me. ~ Peace Pilgrim

The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's. ~ A.E. Housman

The thing is, I was so bursting for the loo that I thought my bladder was going to explode. I could hardly speak, let alone make it up your stairs. When you threw the key down and I had to bend over to pick it up, I thought that was it, I was going to flood the road! And I'm not even exaggerating. I've never been so desperate in my life. ~ Jill Mansell

Over beside Mr. Baynes, General Tedeki said in a soft voice, "You witness the man's despair. He, you see, was no doubt raised as a Buddhist. Even if not formally, the influence was there. A culture in which no life is to be taken; all lives holy." Mr. Baynes nodded. "He will recover his equilibrium," General Tedeki continued. "In time. Right now he has no standpoint by which he can view and comprehend his act. That book will help him, for it provides an external frame of reference. ~ Philip K. Dick

One of the heaviest load so many people are carrying today is neither thoughts about things they lack nor things they wish to have, nor how to manage what they already have, but toxic words that have taken a greater portion of their thoughts and such words not just occupying a great part of their hearts, but also draining their very joy in life! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I think you can go from being not very funny to working really hard for 10 years and figuring out how to make a living on the road, but I don't think you can rise much above that. ~ Amy Schumer

A djinn I am.
My fetters may be broke but
still they wrap round wrist and
ankle:
every djinn's possessed.

The comet they speak of and know
not where it falls,
the love that glows like a lantern
down a road which
means nothing to the fearful:
Those passing see it as a mount,
which keeps you clear of sword
and spike
but holds you up to arrows;
I pass, my shade lashed to my foot,
love eating my soul like an acid;
The dunes change places in the
night without my leave;
The walls around me and their
guards in watches
cannot halt the full moon's com-
ing to my heart
before it's even risen and I've seen
it and
its silver floods my soul.
Here it is with a mattock, shatter-
ing everything inside me.

Translated by Robin Moger ~ Hermes

It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always ~ John Stuart Mill

She remembers her name. She remembers the name of the president. She remembers the name of the president's dog. She remembers what city she lives in. And on which street. And in which house. The one with the big olive tree where the road takes a turn. She remembers what year it is. She remembers the season. She remembers the day on which you were born. She remembers the daughter who was born before you – She had your father's nose, that was the first thing I noticed about her – but she does not remember that daughter's name. She remembers the name of the man she did not marry – Frank – and she keeps his letters in a drawer by her bed. She remembers that you once had a husband, but she refuses to remember your ex-husband's name. That man, she calls him.

She does not remember how she got the bruises on her arms or going for a walk with you earlier this morning. She does not remember bending over, during that walk, and plucking a flower from a neighbour's front yard and slipping it into her hair. Maybe your father will kiss me now. She does not remember what she ate for dinner last night, or when she last took her medicine. She does not remember to drink enough water. She does not remember to comb her hair.

She remembers the rows of dried persimmons that once hung from the eaves of her mother's house in Berkeley. They were the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers that your father loves peaches. She remembers that every Sunday morning, at ten, he ta ~ Julie Otsuka

We moved all around, and I was very worried I would not get a chance to show her what I had planned. Here was the children's home, here was the library, here was a furniture factory of the kibbutz. I tried to squeeze a few words in about everything we saw, as someone who makes himself known and unversed in the ways of the kibbutz. The highlight was when I gave her a tour, on the tractor, to the pear groves where I worked. I drove the tractor and she sat beside me, in a very unsafe way, standing on the shaft as she rested on one of the wheel's wings of the tractor. The groves were just a few minutes away from the kibbutz, on a dirt road that led south towards Acre. I kept explaining to her about new life on the kibbutz the entire time. ~ Nahum Sivan

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually ... and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration. ~ Thomas Paine

My host at Richmond, yesterday morning, could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford, and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son, a clever little boy, to show me the road leading to Windsor. ~ Karl Philipp Moritz

Retire? Not on your life. I have no plans to stop singing. What are you going to do when you love music? It's a terrible disease. You can't stop. Of course, I'd like to get off the road. ~ Peggy Lee

Dreams larger
than ourselves we killed, not wanting
our smallness measured against them."
(poem: Having Taken the Necessary Precautions) ~ Brian Patten

I have been so afraid that our friendship will not survive Clare's death. I can sense this in your voice, too, when we talk. . . .

When I talk to Mark about this, he tries to console me with Aristotle (I hope you are smiling). Aristotle, he tells me, describes three types of friendship: friendship based on utility, on pleasure, and on virtue (the pursuit of good). The third type is the highest and most stable form. Mark says that we pursue the good, and that sharing new motherhood alone could not possibly replace that.

Maybe right now we are confusing our friendship with a friendship of pleasure, since we have given each other so much of it (hilarity and clogs and dreams of Italy). And we are worried since these friendships fade when pleasure fades (and Clare has taken so much pleasure with her). But surely that's not all we've shared.

The highest friendship, Aristotle wrote, 'requires time and familiarity; for, as the proverb says, it is impossible for men to know each other well until they have consumed together much salt, nor can they accept each other and be friends till each has shown himself dear and trustworthy to the other.' I guess we are now in the phase of eating much salt. . . .

I am not sure what it means to eat much salt, but it doesn't sound pleasant. It makes me think of tears rolling down our faces into our mouths. . . .

Yet this time is not merely that. When I see you or read your letters, I am sud ~ Amy Alznauer

I've seen enough death."
A single angel rose in the darkness from the circle they'd formed around the Qayom Malak. "If she can't do it, she can't do it."
"Shut up, Cam," Arriane said. "Sit down.
Cam stepped forward, approaching Luce. His narrow frame cast its shadow across the Slab. "We've taken it this far. You can't say we haven't given it every kind of shot." He turned to face the others. "But maybe she just can't. There is only so much you can ask a person to do. She wouldn't be the first filly anybody lost a fortune on. So what if she happens to be the last?"
His tone did not match his words, and neither did his eyes, which said with desperate sincerity, You can do this. You have to. ~ Lauren Kate

Sometimes things turn out for the best. And when you end up in the right place, it's not always helpful to go digging up the road that got you there. ~ Jane Harper

If you're not comfortable with delay, frustration and impatience, get out of the Senate. It's the nature of the institution, but I think we've taken it to an art form. ~ Dick Durbin

Sometimes I believe that in life every promise should be taken with suspicion, disbelief, even as a lie because it features knights in the world without knights can not exist. Increasingly it seems that the people make promises lightly, and even easier to not fulfill. I believe that the main task of each of us to make this world a better position, so that all become knights, the swords do not carry it, but the words behind which we stand. ~ Slavisa Pavlovic

The Abominable Snowman has arrived," he said to Milo. "If I'm not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Once upon a time, when I was a child reading fairy tales, I'd ached to have my own adventures. Not that I'd wanted to be some dippy heroine languishing in a tower, awaiting rescue. No, I'd wanted to be the knight, charging into battle against overwhelming odds, or the plucky country lass who gets taken on as an apprentice to a great wizard. As I got older, I'd found out the hard way that adventures are rarely anything like the books say. Half the time you are scared out of your mind, and the rest you're bored and your feet hurt. I was beginning to believe that maybe I wasn't the adventurous type. ~ Karen Chance

Who climbs the mountain does not always climb.The winding road slants downward many a time;Yet each descent is higher than the last. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We must not concentrate overmuch upon our feelings. Do not spend too much time feeling your own pulse taking your own spiritual temperature, do not spend too much time analyzing your feelings. That is the high road to morbidity. ~ Martyn

He looked at Hector's list and told him that, thanks to a lot of studies and calculations, they'd shown that if you compared yourself to others and didn't find yourself wanting, if you had no money or health problems, if you had friends, a close-knit family, a job you liked, if you were religious and practised your religion, if you felt useful, if you went for a little stroll from time to time, and all of this in a country that was run by not very bad people, where you were taken care of when things went wrong, your chances of bring happy were greatly increased. ~ Francois Lelord