Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

Looking back, I wince at the careless way I tossed out my opinions.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Looking back, I wonder where my head was at on some of the last few albums, and I know I was just doing what I thought I needed to at the time.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

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.

I never really spent time being jealous. Maybe I should have.

Regrets, I've had a few but then again too few to mention. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

"Do you have any regrets?" Of course I do.

You either spend your life preparing or you spend your life repairing.

Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different.

Don't look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad?)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that's why we have tat swivel joint in our necks.

In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late.

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.

Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden

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.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That's what makes a person a dumbass, folks.

Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge." -Elinor Dashwood

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.