Ruby Bridges Quotes

We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.

History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.

For a lot of different reasons I didn't fulfil my potential.

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.

Every year, I am reminded of the kids who aren't in the freshman class and aren't graduating. I remember every single one of them. That is the worst of times for me, to see the future snuffed out.

The attempt and not the deed confounds us.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts.

These days I seem to think about the things I forgot to do for you and all the times I had a chance to.

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.

Many feel discouraged because they have not measured up to their potential.

I almost get annoyed at the fact that I'm not going to use all that I got.

The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

The memories for the missed opportunities are stronger than for the ones I managed to get over the line in.

I could have had eight or nine world titles at least, and you do think about that at times.

My twenties were a write-off.

Balotelli, and a few others, have everything that I would have liked to have. It angers me that he does not use his talent to his full advantage.

I think I've underachieved quite heavily.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.