Retrospectively Quotes

#1. I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.

David Mitchell

#2. In reviewing his own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for him to account for his coming to the beliefs and practices that he now has regarding his own kind and normals.

Erving Goffman

#3. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.

Lawrence R. Klein

#4. Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.

Neel Mukherjee

#5. This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary.

Daniel C. Dennett

#6. Contrary to the legend, Darwin's finches do not appear to have inspired his earliest theoretical views on evolution, even after he finally became an evolutionist in 1837; rather it was his evolutionary views that allowed him, retrospectively, to understand the complex case of the finches.

Frank Sulloway

#7. I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

Abbas Kiarostami

#8. She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet. Retrospectively, Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible.

Fredrik Backman

#9. It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

Evelyn Waugh

#10. Everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.

Julian Barnes

#11. I try not to think retrospectively. It's important, as an artist, to look forward, always. I do try to take work that involves some challenge. If you approach a piece of work and you're going, "Yeah, yeah, I can do that," then that's kind of a red flag.

Cillian Murphy

#12. It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#13. Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

George Saunders

#14. 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

#15. There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Terry Eagleton

#16. Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

Carlos Fuentes

#17. If tolerance poses as a middle road between rejection on the one side and assimilation on the other, this road, as already suggested, is paved by necessity rather than virtue; tolerance, as Nietzsche would say, becomes a virtue only retroactively and retrospectively.

Wendy Brown

#18. In the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do.

Jack Nicholson

#20. But the technology is only trivial retrospectively - not prospectively.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#21. The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There's no way of knowing this until you register it in visible form. But the other side of this is that you do have some idea of where you are going.

Teju Cole

#22. On ACHIEVEMENT: "We all need encouragement--I love Notable, Quotable, DO-able Quotes!

Nanci McGraw

#23. Investors have no reason to feel bearish. True value investors are glad the markets are down.

Irving Kahn

#24. She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

Virginia Woolf

#25. Stay open, who knows, lightning could strike.

William Parrish

#26. Woe be to the generation that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed.

Henry David Thoreau

#27. There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

Virginia Graham

#28. For years before I became a father, I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully.

Nick Flynn