#hindsight

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#life #life

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement. ↗

— Harlan Coben

#around #before #book #doing #each

In hindsight, that time out of football gives you the hunger to want to get back to basics and play football. ↗

— Alan Smith

#basics #football #get #gives #hindsight

To fulfill your vision, you must have hindsight, insight and foresight. ↗

— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#insight #life-foresight #sight #vision #life

And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament. ↗

— Tom A. Watson

#answer #appropriate #back #been #chief

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#regret #men

Sometimes the best and worst times of your life can coincide. It is a talent of the soul to discover the joy in pain—-thinking of moments you long for, and knowing you’ll never have them again. The beautiful ghosts of our past haunt us and yet we still can’t decide if the pain they caused us out weighs the tender moments when they touched our soul. This is the irony of love. (MU Article, 2010) ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#bad-choices #decisions #family #friendship #hindsight

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany? ↗

— Erik Larson

#been #berlin #course #darkness #era

Hindsight is wonderful. It's always very easy to second guess after the fact. ↗

— Helen Reddy

#always #easy #fact #guess #hindsight

It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins. ↗

— Richard Paul Evans

#life