Roz Chast Quotes

Some things get clearer as you look back on them.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Sometimes you don't understand what you're going through until you're on the other side of it.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

What I learned on 'To Die For,' I learned over the years that followed, when some memory from the shoot would bubble up to the surface of my mind, and I could see it from a new perspective. I would usually cringe when that happened.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

Looking back on things, the view always improves.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings.

Sometimes it takes ten seconds to see some humor in your dilemmas, sometimes ten years.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time.

I don't know why it is, but sometimes I feel like I'm 60. It's like I've been around for a long time. I felt that way even when I was 8.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

With time and experience comes a different perception of what's going on around you.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Time puts things in proper perspective.

Life's pretty funny when you're objectively on the outside looking at it.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.