Nam June Paik Quotes

There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance.

There are times when I wish I could go back and change the course of my life. Make different choices...But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on. Do you remember that I told you that at Spence?

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes - only sooner.

We know that we can't undo our whole lives.

There is no rewind button for life.

I walked away from acting for eight years and tried to make the choice that I should have made when I was 21. But, it doesn't make any difference. Nothing changed. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.

When your future arrives, will you blame your past?

You can't magic yourself back 10 years.

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

Given the opportunity, I might change a choice I made, but you can't regret making what you thought was the best decision at the time.

You can't go back and alter the past.

The past is history. I can't change any of that.

The past is the past, and I can't go back in time to change anything.

You simply cannot change what has happened in the past.

The past is the past: what can you do about it?

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

When I look back, if I'd played something differently, it might not have gone the way it did. So I don't feel like going back to my twenties and changing anything.

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

I'm not big on regret - until time travel actually exists, it seems like a waste of making yourself feel bad

We can never go back.

What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.