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Hindsight Quotes

Browse 233 quotes about Hindsight.

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Hindsight Quotes

“What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.”

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Book:On Writing
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“We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods, but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow. We know which debts will never be repaid. Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm. Poor dead, blindfolded dead, gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent. We see the faces people make behind their backs. We catch the sound of wills being ripped to shreds. The dead sit before us comically, as if on buttered bread, or frantically pursue the hats blown from their heads. Their bad taste, Napoleon, steam, electricity, their fatal remedies for curable diseases, their foolish apocalypse according to St. John, their counterfeit heaven on earth according to Jean-Jacques… We watch the pawns on their chessboards in silence, even though we see them three squares later. Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different. Or a little bit different – which is to say, completely different. The most fervent of them gaze confidingly into our eyes: their calculations tell them that they’ll find perfection there.”

DeathLettersDeadHindsight
Book:View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
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“So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.”

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Book:Beyond the Pleasure Principle
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“Regret is a strange animal, son. It makes you create alternate realities inside your head with hindsight as your guide. You long for those imaginary outcomes until it's a sickness. But there's also another side to regret. Remembering its pain made me love your gramma more fully, embrace every moment with your dad and with you. Take nothing for granted. Because I knew how much it cost to get it wrong.”

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Author:Amanda Cox
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“Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.”

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Book:Leaving Brooklyn: A Novel
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“But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.”

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Book:War and Peace
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“I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics. I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damn nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events but while they're happening I merely want to be out of them.”

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Book:Homage to Catalonia
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“Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.”

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Author:Mary Swan
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“Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be—your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.”

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Book:We Need To Talk About Kevin
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“In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

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Book:The Remains of the Day
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“It is possible to sit still and watch your thoughts arise and then, without grabbing them, watch them disappear. This is the practice of meditation and mindfulness, a practice that you learn to carry with you. The goal isn’t to stop thoughts. Instead, the goal is the practice of seeing them clearly as they come into view and then letting them go. If you can notice anger or anxiety arising at the ground level, in its first inception, then you can easily watch it dissolve. In these instances, it is present sight, not hindsight, that is 20/20.”

Meditation QuotesHindsightNote To SelfSitting StillStillness QuotesMindful QuotesBeing HereWatching Your MindSeeing Clearly Quotes
Author:Eric Overby
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