Top 100 Quotes About Not Looking Back
#1. He'll have to do without me, Jamie thought, not looking back. And then clearly, as if he'd been told, he knew Grenville /could/ do without him. There was somewhere else he had to go now, somewhere else he had to be.
S.E. Hinton
#2. But she was gone, and Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones. The
Ayana Mathis
#4. Walking away had been easy.
Not looking back was harder.
V.E Schwab
#5. Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren't already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.
Ayana Mathis
#6. I think of an old sermon my grandfather quoted from time to time - something about not looking back when you're plowing a field, but instead finding a mark in the distance and focusing on that. Otherwise, the rows won't come out straight.
Lisa Wingate
#7. It's funny: over time, if you're fortunate, you build a nice career, and you have these interesting moments, and I would not, looking back, trade any of them - 'Red Tails,' '12 Years a Slave' and 'Undercover Brother.'
John Ridley
#8. She's life, and I'm death. Prescott Burlington-Smyth is everything I want to be. A storm moving out of a shit situation at the speed of light, not looking back to spare a glance at the casualties of her actions. How
L.J. Shen
#9. I'm selling my soul to Hollywood Records. I love you like a love song baby, a sinful, miracle, lyrical. He ate my soul. He's Lucifer. I'm torn I'm selling my soul to the rhythm because I'm become so possessed with the music he plays. I chose a path and I'm not looking back.
Selena Gomez
#10. The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.
Arturo Perez-Reverte
#11. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds
W.G. Sebald
#12. The narcissist enjoys being looked at and not looking back.
Mason Cooley
#13. My happiest moment is the day they call wrap and I'm free. I'm not looking back.
Brad Pitt
#14. Part of the challenge of being a girl living in the 21st Century, looking back, the danger is to not judge your character by your own standards.
Zoe Kazan
#15. Age isn't a barrier to playing the bass, and I've definitely improved over the years, although maybe I'm not as flash as I once was. But looking back, I can't imagine a life without a guitar.
Suzi Quatro
#16. I laugh and go back to looking at my magazine. Actually, it's not really a magazine. It's a math journal, because I'm super cool like that.
Tarryn Fisher
#17. It's not about being upset about the things you might have said or done yesterday, which is quite appropriate at the moment. It's about looking forward rather than looking back. I hate people who look back on the past or talk about what might have been.
Noel Gallagher
#18. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
Henry James
#19. I've seen him drop girlfriends and friends on a whim and never so much as think about looking back. It's not that he's cruel; he just doesn't realize what he's doing.
Tammy Blackwell
#20. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient. I'm not fearful of my condition or my future - but if someone is looking in my eyes for fear, then they see their own fear reflected back at them.
Michael J. Fox
#21. At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.
Ann Patchett
#22. It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be - even if it isn't what you expected.
Jim Butcher
#23. I am not overlooking any mail. I'm looking at all of it. I even wrote back to the Viagra people.
Randy Newman
#24. It may be tempting to look back and wring our hands over missed opportunities for change in the preceding decades. But, I'm not interested at looking in the rearview mirror except to learn.
Jennifer Granholm
#25. Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
Edna Ferber
#26. I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
#27. 1926 was the most significant year. Looking back, it seems that it was not just a year in the sense of time. It was a year of great realisation or awareness. It seems to me that at certain times of the history of man, the understanding of certain situations ripens.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#28. The audience may not have felt it was right, and the author may have felt a little upset, but every part I've played I've twisted around in my mind until I've made it into something of my own. Looking back over it, I didn't deliberately sit down and plan like that, but it does read like it.
Katharine Cornell
#29. If it's not in your heart you're not gonna make it. At the end looking back, you know its worth it.
Amy Dumas
#30. But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back - all the stories say so. Look what happened to Lot's wife. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings?
Stephen King
#31. You ever wonder if it's really not more complicated than that?" I ask. "That maybe everyone else is right, and people like you and me just need to quit looking for stuff to be depressed about?" She looks up, and then back at her dirt, dismissing this stupidity without comment. When
Matthew Norman
#32. How the hell did you get to the cloister and back so fast?"
"I have a moose."
"A moose."
"Yeah, you know, big deer looking thing, likes water... antlers, well, not this moose, Una's female."
"I want a moose," Brede mumbled.
Sally Courtnix
#33. She was so stupid. He was just another cowboy looking for someone to shine his buckle, and she'd fallen for it. What a fool. But, she wasn't a fool anymore. She knew who and what she was, and that man was not coming back into her life. No matter how sexy he still was.
Tamara Hoffa
#34. When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.
Ayn Rand
#35. Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.
Anne Lamott
#36. God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love under the wings of Jesus.
John Piper
#37. It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not.
Harrison Ford
#38. Fashion's not about looking back. It's always about looking forward.
Anna Wintour
#39. Anything that lifts responsibility for our actions is addictive, I've found. So really, looking back, I'd have to say that was not the hard moment. The tough bit is always later, when you're held responsible for yourself again, and your life is expected to go on.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#40. Looking back, I've learned the most from the bad coaches, really, how not to act, how not to coach, how not to treat people. So I always say no matter what situations you're faced with, how bad it is, you can always walk away and learn. You can always rise above it.
Jennie Finch
#42. Grief she could not feel, for there had been too much bitterness between her mother and herself to leave in her heart any deep feeling of affection; and looking back on the girl she had been she knew that it was her mother who had made her what she was.
W. Somerset Maugham
#43. I try not to look back. I'm looking forward. I'm worried more about what I'm going to do next week than I am what I did last week. There are too many things to do. Looking back is for everybody else.
Neil Young
#44. Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
Salman Rushdie
#45. She ran a finger along the back of his ear. It felt dangerous and thrilling, but not as dangerous and thrilling as it would have been to touch him while he was looking at her.
Maggie Stiefvater
#46. Yelling while eating was like swallowing anger. It's simply not good for us. It leaves us unhappy and unsatisfied, as if the meal didn't count or wasn't good, and an hour later we're back looking for something to make us feel better.
Mary DeTurris Poust
#47. I didn't want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.
Julian Barnes
#48. Looking back, retrospectively on the events of that evening, I can see the irony - the shrink whose cat ate his own tail. At the time of the incident, however, humor was not in my emotional repertoire; it was the furthest thing from my mind.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
#49. He knows that having put his hand to the plow he must not look back, because when we are looking back, we are also holding back.
Neal A. Maxwell
#50. If you decide not to make use of the opportunities you have, not to live your life in a way that's constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and asking, 'why did I bother living?
Noam Chomsky
#51. In L.A., you constantly go on auditions, and you're usually not what they're looking for - you get used to going back and back to the same show, and nothing happens.
Nathan Parsons
#52. I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.
Richard Dawkins
#53. He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.
Milan Kundera
#54. The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.
Virginia Woolf
#55. Fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it's caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts.
Meg Wolitzer
#56. Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain.
Booth Tarkington
#57. I'm not embarrassed," Han said to the back of her head. "I am a very good-looking man."
"Indeed you are, sir," the droid replied.
James S.A. Corey
#58. Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.
John Green
#59. I like how you can go back and watch David Lean and John Ford and see the influence that had on Steven Spielberg, especially David Lean, in the camerawork, and yet, you don't watch any Spielberg movie and think of David Lean. Once you're looking for it, you see it all, but it's not in your face.
Colin Trevorrow
#60. There's a time in your life when you have to stop looking back and start looking forward because otherwise you're going to walk down the road one day and bump into a lamppost. But it's not easy.
Anna Maxted
#61. This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.
Barbara Kingsolver
#62. I'm not in the habit of looking back - I leave that till I get old.
William Mulock
#63. It's funny, how fast life changes. One minute you are present, and the next, you might find yourself futilely trying to get back to the world you were once part of. You might find yourself looking for people who can no longer hear you. You are in the world, but not of it.
Jodi Picoult
#64. The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.
Norman Rockwell
#65. As an old man ... looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about ... is suffering, affliction.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#66. I don't know why it's not universally acknowledged that looking back is a terrible idea. It only makes going forward that much harder.
Amanda Bouchet
#67. It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?
Jonathan Franzen
#68. Looking back, there is nothing wrong with that peace, love and equality that the hippies espoused. In many ways, we have regressed because they were into organic food, back to nature, make love not war, be good to all men, share and share alike - which is what many are talking about now.
Imelda Staunton
#69. I thought a wolf's mindset was just to take?"
"I am not just looking at you through the eyes of a wolf, Cora. I am looking at you through the eyes of your mate. It is the only thing that has allowed me to hold back with you. The pull between us is intense.
Franca Storm
#70. Paul says that our troubles are "light." Granted I may not see them as light in the midst of trauma, but looking back on them, they may seem light. He also says they are "momentary." They only last for a short time.
Lisa Bedrick
#71. Was Castro sincere when, during his guerrilla war, he swore that he was not a Communist? If so, when did he change, and why? Looking back, does he believe he might have chosen a better course?
Stephen Kinzer
#72. I'm going to be looking forward, asked to be judged on my record, not taken back as has been the - in a sense, the tendency throughout politics in Northern Ireland, is to always look back, always look at what was said a long time ago, instead of looking forward.
Peter Hain
#73. Looking back on my 50-year eclectic journey in research, I am grateful that it has gone as well as it has, although still not clever enough to open the black box of enzyme structure.
Irwin Rose
#74. But it was difficult, this living in real time only, and not diluting it by looking back or skipping forward. No wonder it's never really caught on with most people, I thought. It's just too hard.
Alice Steinbach
#75. I've never gone back to the stacks after my book's expiration at the front of the store. Not because I'm above it or anything, but I'd be mortified if someone caught me looking for my own book.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#76. I think all of us, looking back on our careers and our lives, there'll probably be a "road not taken" that we'll regret and mourn. Certainly, artists will always feel that way, especially when the path taken was more commercial than the one not taken.
Liz Garbus
#77. Yelena." I halted in the doorway, looking back over my shoulder.
"You once said I wasn't ready to believe your reason for killing Reyad. I'll believe you now."
"But I'm not ready to tell you," I said and left the room.
Maria V. Snyder
#78. He always shares the snacks that his mother sends him, and he's better-looking than Jace. There, I said it. I'm not taking it back." "I
Cassandra Clare
#79. They say not to look back, but if you're not sure what lies ahead, what else is there but looking back?
Laurell K. Hamilton
#80. When I look back, it was a strange period in my life, looking at my childhood and then my teenage years and forming Slayer when I was still 17, not out of high school.
Dave Lombardo
#81. When I was fighting, I would look to excite the crowds with a bolo punch or something taunting. Looking back, they were legal - but not sportsmanlike. I don't recommend another boxer try them. But we looked more to make the robot fights dramatic first and realistic second.
Sugar Ray Leonard
#82. To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.
V.S. Naipaul
#83. Now and then I'd catch my mother looking at my like she was thinking about her life, like she was about to say something, but she never did. I didn't expect it. Sometimes it's better not to go back
just settle accounts as they are, call it even.
Mark Slouka
#84. I'm really looking forward to getting back and winning some matches but I'm not thinking about the U.S. Open yet, just getting through my first match.
Greg Rusedski
#85. I had an opportunity many, many times to go to the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner. Jerry Buss asked me many times and you know what, looking back that was stupid of me not going there.
Marcel Dionne
#86. Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time."
"Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.
Isaac Asimov
#87. Don't look back, girl," Gravier yells as we ride off. "You're not going that way!
Celia Mcmahon
#88. You know, I try not to look back, because looking forward is so much better than looking backward.
Jim Bakker
#89. Looking back, has this journalism experience been a nightmare for you?'
'Not entirely.'
'Did you enjoy any of it?'
'I liked going to the library,' he says. 'I think I prefer books to people
primary sources scare me.
Tom Rachman
#90. I know." He leaned back, looking into her eyes. "But I'm not going anywhere, Jenny. I'll fight to stay with you.
Amanda Gray
#91. I like looking back at art-work or my writing and seeing it in a different perspective...It shows how much one has grown as a creator. Perfection may not exist in reality but I always strive to capture the beauty in whatever I happen to be doing.
Alexander Lloyd Curran
#92. Had been a year earlier. Looking back, it had been a year of growth. Paul's personality had enlarged, he'd gained further wisdom, if not salary,
Julia Child
#93. I felt like looking at the season to this point, we probably hadn't taken enough shots downfield to loosen thing up, ... It does serve a purpose even if you don't hit it. There's nothing that will get a cornerback to back off a little bit than knowing he got beat even if you hit it or not.
Mark Richt
#94. Right now, you know, it's not about the refs or anything else, it's about hitting first, getting on the run and never looking back.
Bill Walton
#95. Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.
Ray Stannard Baker
#96. You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.
Mitch Albom
#97. I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.
John Knowles
#98. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#99. Time talks behind our back. To our face it's friendly and logical, never hesitating to give more of itself. But when we're not looking, it steals our lives and says bad things about us to the parts of us it's stolen
Jonathan Carroll
#100. A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.
Brian Eno
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