Don't Go Backwards Quotes & Sayings

The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence
the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required. — C. G. Jung

you don't have to bend over backwards, either, and go asking her to dinner or something. She does have a family of her own. You're supposed to take my side in this." "I thought you didn't want us to take sides." "No, no, I don't. I mean you shouldn't take her side, is what I'm trying to say. — Anne Tyler

I'm so sorry. I don't think the etiquette manuals cover this sort of situation." He leaned in close, his lips all but grazing her neck, and inhaled. "Mmm. You smell good, too."
She nearly choked. Took a step backwards, until her back met cold stone. "Th-thank you."
"That's better. May I kiss you?" His finger dipped into her shirt collar, stroking the tender nape of her neck.
"I d-don't th-think that's a good idea."
"Why not? We're alone." His hands were at her waist.
Her lungs felt tight and much too small. "Wh-what if somebody comes in?"
He considered for a moment. "Well, I suppose they'll think I fancy grubby little boys. — Y.S. Lee

I don't look backwards. I'm pleasantly surprised, and I feel really proud of the team and what we were able to accomplish together. But really, where I'm focused is the future and where Nest is going. — Tony Fadell

If we don't act , we're just standing still. and the act of standing still is the same as moving backwards when everyone else is in motion all around us, around the world — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

All I want is a chance to start this over with you. We did it backwards, and that's on me. I get it. But damn it, let me try again, because if you don't, it'll be the biggest regret of my life. — Kristen Proby

That's what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."
"You don't even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do. — John Green

There are two kinds of actors
one sits in a dressing room waiting for his call and the other gets out into the business and polishes his craft by absorbing everything. I don't know enough, I'll never learn everything I need to learn. When a guy thinks he's already learned it, he can only go backwards. — Clint Eastwood

Don't go backwards - you've already been there. — Ray Charles

Co-dependency essentially revolves around the sentence: "I am not enough." A co-dependent person will always need another person to validate their worth, their feelings, their ideas and even their existence. This either shows itself as a need to manipulate and control surroundings; or as a need to bend over backwards to make other people feel good, the reason being that "I can't feel good if you don't feel good. — Gudjon Bergmann

I'm sorry."
"Don't worry, dear," the woman said brightly. "The day I encounter Sophia again, I'll grab the nearest heavy object and bludgeon her myself."
Arriane flung out a hand to help Luce up, pulling her so hard her feet shot off the ground. "Dee's an old friend. And a first-class party animal, might I add. Got the metabolism of a donkey. She almost brought the Crusades to a grinding halt the night she seduced Saladin."
"Oh, nonsense!" Dee said, flapping a hand dismissively.
"She's the best storyteller, too," Annabelle added. "Or she was before she dropped off the face of the earth. Where've you been hiding, woman?"
The woman drew a deep breath and her golden eyes dampened. "Actually, I fell in love."
"Oh, Dee!" Annabelle crooned, clasping the woman's hand. "How wonderful."
"Otto Z. Otto." The woman sniffed. "May he rest ... "
"Dr. Otto," Daniel said, stepping out of the doorway. "You knew Dr. Otto?"
"Backwards and forwards. — Lauren Kate

Don't look backwards. That never does any good. Think about the future instead. — Abigail Strom

Maybe the start line was supposed to be your finish line. Don't be afraid to walk backwards. — Tablo

Then the challenge is, once you left brain it and build it, then when you're on stage you have to know it so well that you can get lost in it. I don't want to be onstage looking like a robot, I want to be at the end of the day very emotional and what feels like someone being up there rather than reciting things. That's always the challenge, to analyze and then somehow lose yourself in something you absolutely know backwards and forwards. And nothing's going to surprise you, but you have to be surprised by it and let it surprise you. — Bo Burnham

I was the chief executive once, I've been there. My recommendation to anybody is don't go backwards. — Stuart Rose

Don't walk into the future looking backwards — Stevanne Auerbach

Don't keep your head turned backwards. Look ahead and move on. You are trying to walk forward with your head turned backward. This is why you feel miserable. Just let go! — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

My writing isn't actually guided by issues. I know it seems that way, but I don't sit down and think, Oh, there's this issue I'm bothered about. I only write about things that directly impact my life. When I write, there's a pain that I have to reach, and a release I have to work toward for myself. So it's really a question of the particular emotional circumstance that I want to express, a character that appears, a moment in time, and then I write the play backwards. — Paula Vogel

Because that happened to me when I was little, this is how I will now treat other people"; "Because so and so beat me up and hurt me a long time ago, that gives me the right to treat people the way I treat them, today"; "Because life was hard on me, life should be hard on everyone else around me" - does this sound/ look familiar? It's called victim mentality. When people choose to be the direct product of everything that happened to them, the direct product of every single pair of hands that hurt them. And the world, to these people, must bend over backwards in order to accommodate their wounds. Some people don't want to be loved; they just want to make the world pay. — C. JoyBell C.

I don't ever want to go backwards, I quite like it. I like the freedom and I like the - What I set out to do was to make a big action-adventure movie that ticks all the boxes in terms of audience expectations and spectacle, and yet also make a very personal film and it feels like I've gotten away with that, I've managed that. — Joe Wright

I have little weird things that aren't really specific but are just kind of odd. I write my 5's backwards, and I don't know if anyone would even care, at all. — Christian Serratos

Sometimes I fear that even as a People when we take one step forward, we reel backwards ten times fold. I don't even think on the Precipice of Change will we truly move forward ... It will most definitely take a Miracle. — Solange Nicole

I'll have wine or a piece of cake once in a while, but I don't look at it as sliding backwards, even if I go a whole week without working out. I don't dwell on it and beat myself up - I just try to have a healthier day tomorrow. — Alison Sweeney

Jack doesn't give a jackshit about me. No, wait, I got that backwards. I don't give a jackshit about Jack the Shit. — Sara Wolf

The old adage that people only want what they can't have or what they can't tame - is totally primitive. A being of higher origins will know instinctively that life on earth is a series of chances, moments and concepts. That's really all that you have. So when you find one of these things and it makes you burn, or it makes you feel peace inside, or it makes you look forwards and backwards and here all at the same time - that's when you know to hold onto it. And you hold onto it with every fiber of your being. Because it's in the holding on of these chances and moments and concepts that life is lived. Every other kind of living is only in vitro. I don't care what psychologists say today about how the human mind works. Because one day they will reach this pinnacle and they will see what I see and they will look upon the old ways as primitive. As long and gone. We do not wish to have what we can't have. We wish to burn in whatever flame we have stepped into. — C. JoyBell C.

I didn't want to teach my kid how to read, so I used to read to him at night and close the book at the most interesting part. He said, "What happened then, daddy?" I said, "If you learn to read, you can find out. I'm too tired to read. I'll read to you tomorrow." So, he had a need to want to learn how to read. Don't teach children how to read. Don't teach them mathematics. Give them a reason to want it. In school, they're working ass-backwards. — Jacque Fresco

This process of being mature in an anxious organisation has been likened to learning to sail against the wind; and as any sailor will tell you, this requires concentration and tolerating some tension as the wind pressures the vessel to let it take over the controls. Good skippers know how to tolerate sufficient tension to keep a steady course. They don't try to overpower their vessel with too much sail in order to get to the finish line faster, as they know this will inevitably knock them backwards. They also know not to panic and retreat to the safe harbour of familiarity. They focus on their key tasks of setting the course and letting the crew know their intensions so that each person can get on with focusing on their own tasks. There's only one path to growing this ability: through patient, thoughtful perseverance in the midst of experience ... no short cuts to be found. — Jenny Brown

Hi Ayden!"
Oh, come on! I skidded a sharp right and hunkered down, peeking through shelves.
Ayden strode past the front desk. "Ladies. Don't you all look especially radiant today."
They giggled like toddlers. Pushovers.
"Ayden, could you help us put some of the books away on the taller shelves?"
"Can't. Sorry." He faced them but walked backwards, arms spread wide. "I'm on a mission. Maybe you can help. Did you happen to see a stunning redhead? Tall, leggy. I call her my goddess of a girlfriend."
More giggles. From me. Pull it together, Aurora.
A&E Kirk, Drop Dead Demons — A&E Kirk

I don't know whether we'll have another Michael Jackson or Elvis, because the world's too quick to level the playing field in that regard. For example, if Michael Jackson did the moonwalk for the first time now, and it debuted on Twitter, the third comment would probably be: "He's just walking backwards." — Matthew Healy

I don't ever think about the roads I didn't take because I spend too much time thinking what's ahead. I don't go backwards. — Kelli O'Hara

In Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound". It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. — Don Draper

Mrs Chadwick used to say the same about my English, about going round the houses. But to be honest, I like going round the houses. And as for beginning at the beginning, the reason I never start there is that I don't know where the beginning is, and that's the honest truth. And anyway, I've never known anything in my whole life that ever started at the beginning. Things aren't like that. They usually start about halfway through, or near the end, and then work their way backwards, that's how must things are. — Alex Shearer

You don't realize that if you stop looking backwards craving the love and acceptance which you didn't receive from your parents, then you might open your eyes to what is available for you now. But you won't let go. If only you could see that looking back into an incomplete and imperfect past, with regret, blame, guilt or resentment is keeping you from the treasures that await you here now. The past has gone. You cannot rectify something that is no longer with you. — Leonard Jacobson

You matter as much as the things that matter to you. And I got so backwards trying to matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do. — John Green

Both of us don't go backwards and I think that is the key to the fight. Whoever ends up going backwards is going to lose. — Ricky Hatton

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct. — Chloe Thurlow

The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards. — Roberto Benigni

Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything [Fred Astaire] did, .. backwards and in high heels.
From: Frank and Ernest by Bob Thaves, art by Bob Thaves. — Bob Thaves

Mai grins at Mycroft. 'You know that's slightly ridiculous, don't you?'
He smiled. 'Why?'
'Because. . . because you're teenagers.' Mai's expression says it should be obvious. 'Mycroft, this isn't like figuring out who spray-painted some guy's car. This is murder.'
'The principles are the same' he insists.
'But you're both minors. And you have no access to police information, no experience, no forensics lab, no authority. . . '
'Mai, are you trying to bring me down or something?'
Gus, who usually only gets emotive about things like soccer, suddenly leans forward. 'I think you should do it.' He glances at me and Mycroft in turn. 'This homeless guy, it's not like his death is going to be a major priority, is it? The police won't bend over backwards to bring his killer to justice or anything. He was a derelict with no family. So you two are the only ones who even care. — Ellie Marney

How do you reconcile the lifestyle between the United States and Mexico? One is a very prosperous country, the other one is somewhat backwards. I mean, I don't want to denigrate them. And people want to go from Mexico into the US because it's much better there. Mexicans also have a grudge against the US. Most of the Western US was Mexican territory once, but they prefer to being in the US, not Mexico. — Moshe Arens

I don't know where to go, I stay planted in front of the cardboard chef. I don't need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Goodbye to my friends at home, goodbye to people I've trusted. I've got to go out and make my way, I might get rich, you know I might get busted. But my heart keeps calling me backwards, as I get on the 707. Ridin' high, I got tears in my eyes, you know you got to go through hell before you get to heaven. Big ol' jet airliner, don't carry me too far away. Big ol' jet airliner, 'cause it's here that I've got to stay. — Steve Miller

Walk out backwards if you must go, but please don't wave good-bye. — Sara Evans

Time moves forward don't live backwards — E'yen A. Gardner

Why do I get the feeling our relationship is backwards?" Ryn asks as he wanders into my room, shrugs his jacket off, and hangs it over the back of my desk chair. "Isn't it usually the girl who always wants to talk about feelings and the guy who bottles everything up inside?" "I don't bottle things up," I shoot back. Well, there is an imaginary box I like to hide things in, but that's different. "Right. — Rachel Morgan

Don't play the reels of your life backwards - play them forward. — Art Hochberg

It doesn't mater if you're a slow walker, so long as you don't walk backwards. — Abraham Lincoln

If you keep looking backwards, you don't go anywhere. — Jeff Ross

There is no straight path from your seat today to where you are going. Don't try to draw that line. You will not just get it wrong, you'll miss big opportunities. And I mean big-like the Internet. Careers are not ladders, those days are long gone, but jungle gyms. Don't just move up and down, don't just look up, look backwards, sideways around corners. Your career and your life will have starts and stops and zigs and zags. Don't stress out about the white space-the path you can't draw- because there in lies both the surprises and the opportunities. — Sheryl Sandberg

The irony is that I don't think we took a step backwards to make 'Group Therapy'. I think we took a step forward because it's a lot more complicated to make that kind of album. I think that album was far more produced than 'American Apathy', and it had a lot more harmony vocals and lots of intricate parts musically speaking. — Brian Ebejer

One night last year when my father and I were eating supper at 6.17 p.m., I said to him, "Did you have a favourite?"
"A favourite what?" asked my father.
"A favourite foster mother."
"Yes, I did," said my father. "Her name was Hannah Pederson."
"That is very interesting," I told him, recalling Mrs Leibler's conversational tips, "because 'Hannah' is a kind of word called a palindrome. That means you can spell it the same way whether you start at the beginning or the end. My name is not a palindrome because if you spell it backwards it's E-S-O-R. But it does have a homonym."
My father said, "Don't get started on homonyms, Rose."
So I said, "Did you have any favourite foster brothers or sisters?"
"Yes," said my father after a moment.
"How interesting," I replied. "Did any of their names have homonyms? — Ann M. Martin

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. — Ray Bradbury

To play a specifically gay event for me is a backwards step. I don't want to play gay events because I don't want anybody coming to the show thinking that they're not part of the group. — Jason Sellards

I don't know about torture. I have educated myself on many things but on torture I have not known the boundary between what is torture and what isn't torture. I know the NRA tie these people (rebels, etc.) when they catch them. They tie their hands backwards. I am now being told that is torture. It is the traditional method. — Yoweri Museveni

How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' Thst sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that.
Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time. — Meg Jay

It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts. — George Orwell

Certainly,' said his mother, 'but first I want to know about the accident with your bicycle.'
Well,' Phillip said, 'if you wanta really know. I was sitting in the basket of my bike ridin' down Mission Hill backwards singing 'Polly Wolly Doodle' and I saw the bread truck comin' and I guess I didn't turn soon enough and I ran into the Wallaces' iron fence and I caught my shoe on the pedal and my pants on a picket and I hit my eye on the handlebars and I don't know what else happened. But, boy, you should have heard the kids and that ole breadman laugh! — Betty MacDonald

What are you doing?" He asks looking intimidating.
I shrug, "I want pancakes."
"I'll make you pancakes."
I laugh and turn around to walk backwards, "I don't want your pancakes. I want normal pancakes. Not head game pancakes. Not maybe I'll make you happy or maybe I'll scare the shit out of you pancakes. You know? — Tara Brown

Around here ... we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things. — Walt Disney Company

Inside the room there sat a rocker, which she sat on, and which had rocked her while she sipped the beer, because in spite of herself she had become so giddy to have so quickly relieved her heart that she allowed herself to lean backwards while in the rocker, which had made it possible for the rocker to rock her, although it was not her intention to be so rocked. Also there stood an ironing board with a still hot iron on it that was burning a yellow shift, and there was, among several items that were not as noticeable to the woman, and yet were noticeable enough to at least bear mention, a fake man.
"I hope you don't mind me asking," said the woman who lived in the room, but then while in her chair she nodded off. — Justin Dobbs

I don't know whether the future or 2018 exists or not, but if it exists, I'm offering a show to a museum in Australia titled "Time Reversed." Time is going backwards. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

Chuckling, I cried, "I'm sorry." I pulled even harder and broke loose from his grip, but I fell backwards onto the floor. He slowly stalked towards me, his smile filled with desire and I pointed my hand at him. "Don't. Behave!"
"Don't behave? I accept your terms of parole."
"That's not what I meant!" But when my smile broke through, he knew I was lying. — Devon Ashley

If your coping mechanism to date has been to ignore your weight, don't feel badly. You're in good company. I've done my share of standing on the doctor's scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor came in glancing over my record. I scrutinized his face for any semblance of judgment. Whether or not I faced the scale or the doctor skipped a pep talk, it didn't change the truth and it still pervaded every hour of my waking thoughts. I knew what I needed to do and just agonizingly prolonged it. What about you?

We want our lies to be true--desperately. We think it means less work, less pain. But aren't we experiencing work and pain every day when we are obese? We don't escape it, we just reallocate it, attach it to different problems.

The sooner we face the numbers and start to deal with them, the sooner we can resolve them. — Shannon Sorrels

They throw their clubs backwards, and that's wrong. You should always throw a club ahead of you so that you don't have to walk any extra distance to get it. — Tommy Bolt

This is my theory: the people who shouldn't hate themselves, do hate themselves. And the people who should hate themselves, don't hate themselves. The world is all backwards. See, this is one of the many reasons why God and I are not good friends. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Is it weird that when I see a cool t shirt or pick up a toothbrush or see a new car I don't think about the product itself? I think about the thousands of people and dollars to make it.

I think about how the retailer that took the risk to buy and resell it. Then I work backwards to the store costs, the distributer who got it there, the shipping company that brought it over from China, the factory workers that made it, the people that sourced the materials and the people that harvested the raw materials, and on and on..
.
The global economy is amazing. Your $20 t-shirt is a freaking miracle. — Richie Norton