Charles Dickens Quotes

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

There are definitely plays that I wish that I could have back.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

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.'

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

We all look for lost time.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

The best years are behind me.

No I'm not a great believer in getting back over things and saying if only, or if, or buts because I don't think we actually get anywhere on that.

I often sit back and think, I wish I'd done that, and find out later that I already have.

One of the saddest realities is that we never know when our lives are at their peak. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago.

It is too late; now I wish I could live.

Do you know it was a year a ago today?

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

I try not to look back at anything I do. I avoid it like the plague.

I look back upon my times when more people were listening to what I had to say, and I didn't say enough.