John Greenleaf Whittier Quotes

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

It is bitter to think of one's best years disappearing in this unpolished country.

During my freshman year of college, it became undeniably clear that I didn't want to be great again. I correlated greatness with misery.

It is hard when you think you can do better, but things just aren't working out.

Life is like a movie, if you've sat through more than half of it and it’s sucked every second so far, it probably isn't going to get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. None should blame you for walking out early.

Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall? When you realize, you just can't have it all.

What I've lost in years I've gained in wisdom. Bullshit, I haven't learnt one thing in the last 15 years that hasn't just depressed me more.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

We might have been - these are but common words, and yet they make the sum of life's bewailing.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.

It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

I wish I had had a great disappointment, a real one.

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

I just don't like to lose what's in the window.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.

Some people will always be disappointed.

It would have been great to have had 10 victories and been in the playoffs and have gone all the way and then said, 'Goodbye,' but it didn't work out that way.

I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.

You never forget the feeling of not getting to the World Series. Yes, it sticks with you.

When I finally got there, to where I thought was the top, I wasn't doing what I was doing in the beginning. I was not happy.