Nicole Krauss Quotes

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

I've never been offered a job that I turned down and regretted. I didn't have Stanley Kubrick offer me something and me say no.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.

We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.

The follies which a man regrets the most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

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.

Every opportunity passed is lost.

Missing out on 'Monty Python' was a real blow at the time. I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if I had been invited to join 'Monty Python,' but as the saying goes, one door closes, another opens.

I feel like my story would've been different had I had a chance to play with Bron when I was 18. I've thought about it countless times.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

Regrets are born of paths never taken.

The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line. Will it be everything you dreamed of. We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.

hen Baillie [Walsh, writer and director] wrote the movie for me I wasn't doing what I'm doing today, so when we actually came to make the movie it seemed silly to change it. But who knows? That's the way things go. What was interesting for me - and what was always interesting in the script - was that you've got someone who appears to have everything, or at least has the opportunity to have everything, and he's f**ked it up, or lost it.

The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in my face. Grammar of my life: as a rule of thumb, wherever there appears a plural, correct for singular. Should I ever let slip a royal We, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

Every day thousands of people bury good ideas because they are afraid to act on them.And afterwards, the ghosts of these ideas come back to haunt them.

Nothing is so irretrievably missed as an opportunity we encounter every day.