D. J. MacHale Quotes

I know, but no matter what I choose I have to live with it. Forever. I have to be able to go forward and not look back anymore. Can you understand that?

I suppose in the end it's almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. What's harder - what's much, much harder - is to accept what you actually did do.

I don't know if I would do this if I had to start over again.

Usually, when you make a decision in life, unless you have access to parallel universes, you can't truly judge how right that decision was.

You can't help but... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'

No, I don't regret anything at this point. That may change on the next phone call, but at the moment I don't regret anything.

It's very easy to make certain decisions that affect your life that you have no perspective on.

I think an important lesson from the game is that once you have made a move, you cannot take it back. You really have to measure your decisions. You think a lot. You evaluate your choices very carefully. There's never any guarantee about what's going to follow once you have made a decision.

Every decision you make is a mistake.

What's done can't be undone.

I can't take it back. I can't take anything back. So I don't regret it.

I could have joined West Brom or Brighton. What would have happened had I joined one of them? I do not want to think about it. I do not think about it.

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.

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

Doesn't matter. If I would've had a beer before the game, I would've been drunk. So I don't believe in 'if.'

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?

The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

What happens if your choice is misguided, You must try to correct it But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t? Then you must find a way to live with it.

Only time will tell if it was time well-spent

But in the end, we can’t live our lives by ‘what if’ and ‘if only.’ We can only do the best we can to the best of our ability based on what we know. That’s why the truth is so important.

In a serious sense, wanting to change something from the past doesn't work for me - change something you don't enjoy now rather than regretting it later.

I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done