Marlene Dumas Quotes

I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

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.

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

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.

An emotion that lives with me is a sense of 'what might have been' had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.

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

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

I look back upon my times when more people were listening to what I had to say, and I didn't say enough.

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

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

Tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way.

Often when we realize how precious those seconds are, it's too late for them to be captured because the moment has passed. We realize too late.

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

Maybe you'll call me someday Hear the operator say the numbers no good And that She had a world of chances for you She had a world of chances for you She had a world of chances Chances you were burning through

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit.

It is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished . . .

If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'