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“I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“It's sometimes easier to help others rather than helping yourself. The trick is to listen to your "self" as a friend. This may be the simplest change you ever make in life, with the biggest impact.”
― Lorii Myers, Make It Happen, A Healthy, Competitive Approach to Achieving Personal Success

“Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .”
― Michael M. Lewis, Panic!: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

“Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The power of hope! Even a lack of ambition can, for a time, pay off as a necessary facet, as long as hope outweighs it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I feel like I am either on the cusp of something great, or standing on the edge of my abyss, discovering something brand new, or uncovering somebody elses lost imagination.”
― Carroll Bryant

“Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.

“But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.â€� (pp.115-6)”
― Jay Rayner, Eating Crow: A Novel of Apology

“The Naga laughed softly, 'There's a thin line that separates courage from stupidity.'
'And that line is only visible in retrospect, my friend. If I'm successful, people will call me brave. If I fail, I will be called foolish. Let ,me do what I think is right. I'll leave the verdict to the future.”
― Amish Tripathi, Scion of Ikshvaku

“Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect.”
― Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Old People

“...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole.”
― Félix J. Palma

“Retrospect: the sweetener of life.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“This is love, he would have said, diffidence is love, fear itself is love, even the scorn you feel is love. Each of us comes by it the wrong way. Some spot it right away, others need years, and for some it comes in retrospect only.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Strange that, the way happiness only works in retrospect.”
― Peter Akinti, Forest Gate

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Mirror mirror on the wall,
you don't know me well at all.
Took my number, said you'd call.
I tied that line up gag and all.
What you see is what you get.
Don't reach out to try to pet
my wild kind of intellect.
It can't be tamed by hand or net.
Retrospect.
Are we there yet?”
― Wade The Wordsmith

“Procedures/routines emerges to guard us from failures/difficulties, retrospect their presence on a timely basis, because the roles get reversed in the long-term, Instead of being guarded, we become the guard.”
― Shahenshah Hafeez Khan

“This naked moment may well be apprehended with greater acuity in retrospect, but how can we know if what we view in hindsight will ever have truly been? The uncertainty of it is frightening-but maybe, at the same time, we need not look upon it as a crisis of the human condition. Assimilating this irresoluteness may indeed be our greatest capacity. To live in this perpetual bewilderment and without respite is to be honest, even genuine, with oneself. Perhaps we must embrace the disinterested nature of our anxiety even if we know that it is contrastingly woven from competing threads of self-interest. It is sad that we cannot trust what our senses tell us, trust the information we are given. Or maybe it is beautiful if you see an aesthetic to the indecipherable, to the very thought that even the tiniest shard of logic may pierce at us whilst yet eluding us.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“[On his childhood] I'm sure mine was happier than I imagine in retrospect. I look back and think, "Oh poetic me," but it simply was not true. I was out playing Kick-the-Can along with everyone else.”
― Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

“The regrettable fact of our reality is that life is always lived in the retrospect. We never know what is to come, and most of us haven’t learned how to live in the now. As such, all we have is the past.”
― Michael Vito Tosto, Elsewhere and Otherwise: Essays

“We can only understand some things in retrospect. Hence, we must learn to delay conclusions on whether an event, person, or situation is good or bad.”
― Dele Ayo Bankole

“...it's only when something's damaged beyond repair that we realize how beautiful it was.

[LEO PHILBET]”
― Rosie Walsh, The Love of My Life

“She thought she saw a bird. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something rise past the window, eerie and bird-like but maybe not a bird. She looked and it was a bird, its flight line perfectly vertical, its streaked brown body horizontal, wings calmly stroking, a sparrow not wind-hovering but generating lift and then instantly gone.

She saw it mostly in retrospect because she didn't know what she was seeing at first and had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction, and maybe it wasn't a sparrow at all but a smaller bird, gray and not brown and spotted and not streaked but not as small as a hummingbird, and how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then again.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“what if our flaws weren't something to look down on at all, but a reflection of all the life we'd lived?”
― Kelsie Stelting, Curvy Girls Can't Date Quarterbacks

“You’re gonna go far, kid. Just look at those scars, kid. Everything you’ve been through, they’re blueprints to your path, kid.”
― Evrah Rose, Define Hope

“You don't just see your life flashing before you when you die; you see the life you could have had”
― Ilsa Madden-Mills, My Darling Bride

“The problem with being alive, I can tell you now, is that it happens so fast, we don't have the time to make sense of it in the same way that you can once you're dead.”
― Xóchitl González, Anita de Monte Laughs Last