Erik Bruhn Quotes

When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

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.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

I wanted to be a huge star and I have failed.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life.

I fantasize about going back to high school with the knowledge I have now. I would shine. I would have a good time, I would have a girlfriend. I think that's where a lot of my pain comes from. I think I never had any teenage years to go back to.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

Those regrets that I do have are, exclusively, not doing plays that I wish I had done.

My grandmother really wanted to see me become a singer, but she passed away before I became one.

I feel like I wasted my time in my twenties. When you are beginning to realise your potential you wish you'd realized it earlier.

We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential.

I absolutely hate getting older and it's not because of the way it makes you look. It's because I have this sense of so much still left to do and to see. It's my fear of missing out on the future that really gets to me.

hen we mourn those who die young — those who have been robbed of time — we weep for lost joys. We weep for opportunities and pleasures we ourselves have never known. We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives.

I really wanted to be a dancer, but I just wasn't good enough to do that so that didn't happen.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.

One is not allowed a grief for a life never lived. Yet one has buried the fruit of love, and a great deal of hope and many dreams.

We have to have dreams, even if they never come true.