Backward Quotes

#1. Go back to what's good, what's certain, what's always there. You woke up today. Just start walking. Whatever it is, it'll pass. Time doesn't go backward. That's the one real blessing. It happened; it does you no good to worry. Keep it movin'.

Jesse L. Martin

#2. She turned to Jin now, sprawled by the fire, his hat pulled over his eyes. "I can tell you're awake. Are you coming with us?" He sighed, tipping his hat backward. "Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get some sleep before going to near certain death.

Alwyn Hamilton

#3. Sometimes what makes us insecure and vulnerable becomes the fuel we need to be overachievers. The antidote for a snakebite is made from the poison, and the thing that made you go backward is the same force that will push you forward.

T.D. Jakes

#4. The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

A.J. Liebling

#5. Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Douglas Coupland

#6. My feet took an involuntary step backward as I suddenly envisioned a world where I wasn't a hot tempered smartass. It was a pretty world.

Jennifer R. McDonald

#7. Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can't look forward when you're bitter, only backward - thinking about what you've lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it's gone. In the end, it devours all hope.

Lynn Austin

#8. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#9. You either use the Internet or you are backward.

Lee Kuan Yew

#10. For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

Dean Koontz

#11. The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance, we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we shrink and shrivel.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#12. She had passed the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound road sign a long time ago. Hell, she was cruising the neighborhood streets of tonnage by now. Limping backward, she raised her middle finger to the Fae King.

Thea Harrison

#13. Who is the winner? Not he who wins but he who has established his cheerful oneness with the result, which is an experience in the form of failure or success, a journey forward or a journey backward.

Sri Chinmoy

#14. FAUSTUS: Bell, book and candle, candle, book and bell,
Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell.

Christopher Marlowe

#15. Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

Jean Cocteau

#16. It didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened.

Peter Straub

#17. Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. If you're not growing, you're contracting. If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward.

Reid Hoffman

#18. You can't predict the future. It turns out that you can't predict the past either. Time moves in both directions - forward and backward - and what happens here and now changes them both.

Nicola Yoon

#19. The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#20. It was like a song, one of those sweet, wrenching songs that makes the hair on your arms stand up. That makes you want to throw yourself on the floor and just bawl. Or fall backward and surrender to the music utterly.

L.J.Smith

#21. Bell, book, and candle, candle book and bell, forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell.
Anon you shall hear a hog grunt,a calf bleat, and an ass bray,
Because it is Saint Peter's holy day

Christopher Marlowe

#22. Memories and loneliness look backward, fear looks around, but faith always looks forward.

E. Lynn Harris

#23. Bend over backward, do a favor, and give and build confidence in people. It's a time to compliment, support and acknowledge the good things people do.

Erwin K. Thomas

#24. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was now obliged to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#25. Balkanization.. had come to denote the parcelization of large & viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.

Maria N. Todorova

#26. We can't go backward. There are too many regrets. Please just move forward with me?

Renee Carlino

#27. Great Leadership sometimes requires taking a step backward in order to take a leap forward.

Todd Stocker

#28. Can a democratic nation fight a War on Terror and at the same time bend over backward so as not to offend a few visitors' rights?

Annie Jacobsen

#29. Ugh - moral choice: couch or bed, couch or bed? The decision was taken out of my hands as Noah hooked a finger on my back belt loop and tugged me, backward, toward the bed. His arms snaked around my waist and pulled me down alongside him.

Katie McGarry

#30. Even those who limp go not backward.

Kahlil Gibran

#31. He grabbed Ty and dipped him backward, kissing him for all he was worth.

Abigail Roux

#32. The victory of the ignorant masses always means a temporary backward movement in the progression of humanity!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#33. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Kellie Elmore

#34. Love is taking a few steps backward, maybe even more ... to give way to the happiness of the person you love.

A.A. Milne

#35. The rabbit is one of the few animals that (de facto) enjoys screwing: after copulating it does a backward flip and drums on the ground. If it could light up a fag, it would no doubt do that too, and blow smoke rings into the sky.

Peter Zilahy

#36. I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

Donna Tartt

#37. The Arab and Islamic countries suffer from severe backwardness, and the Western world wants to make them even more backward.

Mohammed Mahdi Akef

#38. I'm not terribly technological. I'm awfully backward about iPads and BlackBerries and suchlike; I still have a great fondness for Teletext, and I clung onto my fax machine for as long as I could, but eventually you have to move with the times.

David Tang

#39. There is progress whether ye are going forward or backward! The thing is to move!

Edgar Cayce

#40. The black stream, catching on a sunken rock, Flung backward on itself in one white wave, And the white water rode the black forever. - ROBERT FROST

Kevin Fedarko

#41. Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

Loren Eiseley

#42. It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

Yasunari Kawabata

#43. The old dictum was backward. It should be "Better not to
have loved at all, than to love and have lost." I had done the
right thing, I reassured myself. So why did it feel like I had
made the biggest mistake of my life?

Amy Plum

#44. In my dream, all of the collapsed ceilings reformed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of planes whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#45. Their bodies are tall and skinny, but their legs are huge. Their knees allow them to walk backward. We call them the backward-walking people. They have strange heads. When they are walking, their heads flip backward so they can see where they are going.

Ardy Sixkiller Clarke

#46. Ingenuity and creativity, even for a defeating case of two steps forward and one backward, applied strategically can covert a loss into gain.

Priyavrat Thareja

#47. There's only so far we can step backward in one day

Leisenring

#48. The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.

Isabel Allende

#49. There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.

John Burnham Schwartz

#50. The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

Eric Foner

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

Burt Lancaster

#52. A good soldier, whether he leads a platoon or an army, is expected to look backward as well as forward; but he must think only forward.

Douglas MacArthur

#53. You know that feeling when you tip your chair too far and begin to fall backward? The sensation was something like that, mixed with self recrimination and the fear of death.

Patrick Rothfuss

#54. Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.
From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954

Sylvia Plath

#55. If Bangladesh succumbs to the rule of one family, it would be a major step backward for the region.

Khaleda Zia

#56. Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.

George Martin

#57. You have to split, bend over backward, touch our toe to our heads to get recognized.

Monique Coleman

#58. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope; and only backward pulls Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. How much I could do if I only tried. * (1803-1873) English dramatist, novelist, and politician.

Napoleon Hill

#59. Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense.

Alexander Lowen

#60. Us ballplayers do things backward. First we play, then we retire and go to work.

Charlie Gehringer

#61. All around me I hear the pleasant chortle of Dutch. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can't imagine why. Then it dawns on me. Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward! ...
I wonder if I recorded someone speaking Dutch and played that backward, it would sound like regular English!

Eric Weiner

#62. Sometimes the travelers were wise enough to put their clothes on backward for protection - but not often; they mostly died. Vasya

Katherine Arden

#63. I start with the joke line and write backward.

Nipsey Russell

#64. Innovation is about moving forward. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. There is no standing still.

Pearl Zhu

#65. If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

Richard Powers

#66. American women are evolving backward
becoming more focused on their looks than ever. Feminism has been defeated by narcissism.

Maureen Dowd

#67. No wonder women don't negotiate as often as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels.

Sheryl Sandberg

#68. Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence. (29)

Stephen Levine

#69. Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward
after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha.

Robert Brault

#70. It was so impossible to live life backward.

Maggie Stiefvater

#71. It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason. And maybe I've gotten it backward, maybe it's just because I need a reason that I find myself falling in love with her. But I don't think that's it. I think I would have continued along, oblivious, if I hadn't happened to meet her.

David Levithan

#72. Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

James D. Watson

#73. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Kurt Vonnegut

#74. A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#75. That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.

Adam Haslett

#76. Youth faces forward, impatient of the present, panting to anticipate the future. But we who have crossed a certain sad meridian, we turn our gaze backward,and tell the relentless gods what we would sacrifice to recover a little of the past...

Henry Harland

#77. I've finally gotten to a point in my life where I'm not afraid to speak. Where my shadow no longer haunts me. And I don't want to lose that freedom
not again. I can't go backward. I'd rather be shot dead screaming for justice than die alone in a prison of my own making.

Tahereh Mafi

#78. Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward.

Bridget Asher

#79. Children do not grow up all of a piece; look for the child of seven, especially to take many backward glances at the way he has come, while bounds and leaps unevenly ahead in his growth.

Caroline Pratt

#80. You're not a nuthatch, Laurie."
"Oh, but I am. I'm totally upside down. I'm a very backward kind of guy.

Leslea Tash

#81. It was a backward memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline). This

Terry Pratchett

#82. What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

Karen Joy Fowler

#83. I sometimes think I prefer suitors in books rather than right in front of me. How awful, backward, cowardly, and mentally warped that will be if it turns out to be true.

Mary Ann Shaffer

#84. The page contained a single, unfamiliar symbol. It looked like a backward S with the diagonals of an open triangle cutting through it. A straight line bisected both shapes. Could be creepy. Could be nothing.

Erin Kellison

#85. Serve the dinner backward, do anything - but for goodness sake, do something weird.

Elsa Maxwell

#86. Life moves forward, not backward, and it would be wise to listen to what change has to say.

Bryant McGill

#87. Because secular scientists assume the solar system is billions of years old, they believe they are free to extrapolate these motions backward hundreds of thousands of years into the supposed "prehistoric" past.

Anonymous

#88. I rolled my eyes so far into the top of my head I almost fell over backward.

Janet Evanovich

#89. Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.

John Crowley

#90. I staggered backward-her one hand gripping my shoulder, the other still holding my wrists behind her-and she followed until my back hit the wall.

Kim Harrison

#91. But not to take a step forward is to take two steps backward", Abnum protested.

~ Before the Throne

Naguib Mahfouz

#92. Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came, return.

Henry Vaughan

#93. Then I want you to run all of your words backward in your head and listen to them. Then put on my ears and listen to them again, and then tell me what you hear.
-Lydia to Seth

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#94. When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.

Prem Kishore

#95. I can't comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.

Dexter Palmer

#96. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; - read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#97. It's screwed up, is what it is. Ain't normal to rain roses. That's like a clock running backward, or well water turning to blood.

Jodi Picoult

#98. and I'm thrown backward. I land on my left elbow, hear it crack. Pain splinters through me. A Scavenger looms over me. Impossible to say whether

Lauren Oliver

#99. The average term length of a member of congress is approaching 15 years, and the average term length of a convicted criminal is less than three. We've got that backward.

Oliver North

#100. If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire.

Kevin Brockmeier