Jandy Nelson Quotes

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.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

I have to stop watching the Olympics. It just reminds me that I forgot to try really hard at something.

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.

And I laugh at myself for thinking I could touch the sky.

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

I often sit back and think, I wish I'd done that, and find out later that I already have.

You know, I hate to sound self-involved, but I feel like I haven't peaked yet.

You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.

I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.

My failures have made me look at myself in a way I've never wanted to before.

Basically, when I did 'Infinity' in 1997, I had thoughts in my head that left me with a lot of questions. I've gone to certain personal limits with 'Infinity' that, at the end of it, I think, scared me. And I've made a lot of really kinda bad mistakes as a result of that.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

I did nothing that I might not have done better.

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late. It does not improve the temper.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

I am not the kind of person I want to be.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

I found myself in the changed man theory the other night thinking, "Yeah." I thought, "My god. If we could do this again," but there was nothing specific there. There's just the kind of vague sensation of how I'd like it to go. I allowed myself that gift to think that.

My past is everything I failed to be.

Either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme, Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself, That I recoil and droop, and seek repose In listlessness from vain perplexity, Unprofitably travelling towards the grave.