Stephen King Quotes

It's okay to look back, just don't stare.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

I don't really look into the past too much.

I don't spend much time looking back at what happened. I do remember it, but I don't see any purpose of wanting to look back.

I don't look back and regret anything.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I don't really regret anything in my life.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I'm not a great one for looking back.

The want to return to the fold doesn't mean you can repeat history.

I try not to look back on my life and be regretful.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.

Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn't.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

On that first day when we look back, either happily or with remorse, to the stony ways over which we have traveled, losing concern for that part of the journey which is yet to come, we have grown old.

Use memories. Do not let memories use you.

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.