Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.

For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.

There are many things that, if I have to relive, maybe I will do it another way. But I would not like to look back and think what I have not been able to.

I'm certainly not sorry that there were some things I missed. You may think you're missing something at that time but later when you look at it, you didn't miss anything.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Your regrets aren't what you did, but what you didn't do. So I take every opportunity.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

I don't think I could give advice to my younger self because she probably wouldn't listen.

In those days he was wiser than he is now - he used frequently to take my advice.

You cannot look back and think what if.

My dad always made sense. My dad was only wrong when I didn't understand him. Had I listened to him, my life would have been so much easier.

I wish I would have listened, when I was a kid, to my elders or people who had my best interests at heart, and then I wish I would have been more conscious at that age also.

One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

Good advice I always hated, but lookin back it made me greater.

But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.

Don't do as I did. I'm living proof of how not to live.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

There's mistakes that I have made. Some chances I just threw away. Some roads I never should've taken. Been some signs I didn't see. Hearts that I hurt needlessly. Some wounds that I wish I could have one more chance to mend, but it don't make no difference: The past can't be rewritten. You get the life you're given.

How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.

Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.

Life comes in the form of opportunities, which are easy to recognize, after they have been wasted.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.