Emily Giffin Quotes

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.

The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.

Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

I hope, George, that you know what you're doing.

Decision-making is very scary for me.

If I'm put in a situation where I am not really sure what's going to happen, it can be overwhelming. I get a bit anxious.

Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels.

It's natural to get nervous about anything you care about.

I think it is a burden... that we constantly realise that there isn't that much rhyme or reason to why something happens. If we think about that too much, it can make all of our decisions very stressful.

There are no simple answers in life. There is a good and bad in everyone and everything. No decision is made without consequence. No road is taken that doesn't lead to another. What's important is that those roads always be kept open, for there's no telling what wonder they might lead to.

It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and your life's a disaster. In real life it's often impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes-often-neck and neck.

In New York the stakes are so high. In urban centers the stakes are so high. You marry the wrong person, you go to the wrong college, you take the wrong job. Any of these things could really get you in trouble down the road. Or in your mind anyway. You're afraid to make any move, it's paralyzing.

There are no safe choices. Only other choices.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

Frustration is the mother of risk.

I think at times of significant stress people are going to be looking for something and they don't always know exactly what it is that they're looking for and they may opt for change even if they're not entirely confident what that change will bring.

You have to make a decision, what you want to do in life, ... Your deal can be, you can leave tomorrow. Soon as you leave, you will be forgotten.

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

There aren't any answers, only choices

You have to choose your future regrets.

Worry retards reaction and makes clear-cut decisions impossible.

A tiny change today brings us to a dramatically different tomorrow. There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us.

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.