Jonathan Tropper Quotes

No matter how happy anyone is with their choices, I believe it's human nature to wonder about the path not taken.

When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'

Who's to say what would have happened if I had trusted my instincts and moved to New York like I thought I would.

His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.

Regrets are born of paths never taken.

I knew if I had gone to school - if I had gone to Juilliard and danced for four years - I would have spent every day wondering what would have happened if I had gone to Los Angeles instead.

Some of our important choices have a time line. If we delay a decision, the opportunity is gone forever. Sometimes our doubts keep us from making a choice that involves change. Thus an opportunity may be missed.

If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.

If I hadn't left Texas, I might not have met the director Terrence Malick, and I wouldn't have met my husband and I wouldn't have had the children that I've had. Life is interesting like that.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.'

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.

I don't really spend a lot of time discounting the things I'm doing in hopes that I could be doing something else.

Missing out on 'Monty Python' was a real blow at the time. I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if I had been invited to join 'Monty Python,' but as the saying goes, one door closes, another opens.

Would I change anything? I don't know, that's a double edge sword for me.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: 'On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

Don't put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It's just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you've made up your mind which way to go.

I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn t done that. I hadn t done this thing and I had done another. And so?

When I won the competition, I had just been offered a job as a designer in Düsseldorf, so that's probably what I'd be doing now. It can be fascinating to consider how your life might have turned out, like in the movie Sliding Doors, but I'm too busy to look back.

The thing with giving up is you never know. You never know whether you could have done the job. And I'm sick of not knowing about my life.

Life is too short to be wondering, 'What if?'

In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You're afraid to make any move, it's paralyzing.

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?