Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.

The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.

My greatest regret is not having gone to Wellesley College. it is something I have felt a little sad about my whole life.

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.

Regret is distress over a desire unfulfilled or an action performed or not performed.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

Graveyards are filled with books that were never written, songs that were never sung, words that were never spoken, things that were never done.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies." While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the moo-oo-oon, "If only, If only.

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

Undeveloped, the whole thing,tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that's why we broke up.

Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.

I felt exactly like the man in the advertisement who has not devoted fifteen minutes a day to the study of the classics. If only (I thought) I had devoted fifteen minutes a day to the cultivation of the aesthetic attitude! I could bound Afghanistan.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

If we measured life in the things that almost happened, we wouldn't get anywhere.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

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

If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?