Brian Lara Quotes

I loved every minute of my 17-year career, all the Test matches, the ODIs and the World Cups. The only disappointment, if you ask me, was I never won a World Cup for West Indies.

I am thankful that I played the game at a time when the West Indies climbed to heights that have never been repeated.

The most famous cricketers are too big to play county cricket.

The West Indians and Pakistanis play one-day cricket so well because they play for English counties.

Just in a matter of eight months to win the U-19 World Cup as captain and then make the Test team is quite unreal.

England has some very good cricketers. And don't rule West Indies out. They have some explosive players.

The West Indies team I played for in the 1970s and 80s was truly blessed to have so many brilliant individuals in one group. We had many great fast bowlers but the deadliest was my fellow Antiguan Andy Roberts.

It has been a great honour to play for the West Indies, to hold a bat and to spend 17 years in international cricket. That is something I am proud of.

It's something that I've wanted to do for a while, play Big Bash. Unfortunately representing the Proteas for the bulk of my career over Christmas time we've always got Test matches on, the Boxing Day and New Year's Test matches. So I haven't been available.

When I was aspiring to play for India, I'd look at the Ricky Pontings and the Matthew Haydens and think they were very intimidating.

I'll definitely play cricket again, but only socially. I've still got a lot of friends at my local team, Green Mount, and I do miss playing, but I don't regret anything.

I'm looking forward to the new challenge that playing T20 cricket in England will bring.

There are cricket-loving people here, much like in Pakistan. Overall, I've enjoyed a lot playing in India in my cricketing career.

I have many, many fond memories of Yuvraj Singh. He started under my captaincy.

I grew up at a time when West Indies dominated the world. For 15 years from 1980, the West Indies never lost a Test series.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once--through inexperience, as we now perceive--we missed that happiness we might have found!

You know, a few months ago, I made a terrible mistake. I realized something, and instead of crushing the thought the moment it came I... I let it hang on, and now I know it to be true. And I'm afraid it's stuck in my head forever. These are the best days of our lives. It's a terrible thing to know, but I know it.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.