Lauren DeStefano Quotes

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

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

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Tatiana...you and I had only one moment..." said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street. "I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

Probably no one alive hasn't at one time or another brooded over the possibility of going back to an earlier, ideal age in his existence and living a different kind of life.

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.

Haven't you ever wished that you could steal back just a few hours of your past?" she asked softly. "That's all I want... just a little taste of what might have been.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

The past is like a handful of dust. It filters through your fingers, disappearing little by little. I wish, for one day, I could go back. In another life I would do things differently.

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

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

What science-fiction premises do is it gives you a "what-if" prism to look at the contemporary world with a wack on the side of the head.

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

In another life, I would be your girl, we keep all our promises, the us against the world, In another life, I would make you stay, So I don't have to say you were the one that got away the one that got away

I wonder if the conversations you've never had with someone count, if you've been over them a thousand times in your mind.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.