Forward Backward Quotes & Sayings

I want you sore, baby," he murmurs, and he continues his sweet, leisurely torment, backward, forward. "Every time you move tomorrow, I want you to be reminded that I've been here. Only me. You are mine. — E.L. James

It's like we're strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot ... Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don't
they can't see that these 'circles' are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing ... — Tom Wolfe

Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother's uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self. — Abraham H. Maslow

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

FAUSTUS: Bell, book and candle, candle, book and bell,
Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell. — Christopher Marlowe

By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. — Fulton J. Sheen

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. — Kathryn Schulz

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children. — Nancy Friday

For backward or forward, eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be. — Herman Melville

I think for kids it's the most important part of the game. You have to be able to skate forward and backward, stop and start, go from side to side. Those are the basics of the game. — Bobby Hull

We are the archers with the bows that spring our children forward. Life does not go backward, nor does it tarry in yesterday. It is not a circle, but an arrow. It flies forward with the great express of Love. — David Paul Kirkpatrick

We always have to go backward to move forward. Whether it's to face our own missteps or reach the end of our lives with a final mistake... We always have to go back to pull ourselves out of ignorance or cast ourselves deeper into revenge. — Amy Rachiele

When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark. — Lucy Grealy

No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward a time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of our Revolutionary ancestors. — Calvin Coolidge

We cannot go backward. We cannot erase time and events. But we can go forward, hand in hand, hope in our hearts and love lighting our way. — Sharon Shinn

That's when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
They are the meaning. — Lauren Oliver

You learn from your mistakes, or you go backward. I'm the kind of person who wants to move forward. — Ndamukong Suh

I shun all activities and you have none. You have freed yourself from all duties which had been forced on you. And so you need not know what time of the day or what time of the week, or numbers, reckoning of before and after, when and how far; in short you don't have to know the business of counting, which habit has made us human beings miserable in many ways. We have lost the faculty of appreciating the present living moment. We are always looking forward or backward and waiting for one or sighing for the other, and lose the pleasure of awareness of the moment in which we actually exist. — R.K. Narayan

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood. — Joshua Foer

Every food I choose to eat helps me become more conscious of how it either moves me forward to my fab weight or backward to my flab weight. — Karen Salmansohn

I inhale slowly, soaking it all in. I step forward and backward, my neck twisting and turning, memorizing every corner. I feel an instant connection to this place. Something about being here grabs me and infatuates me. I begin taking mental pictures of the narrow alleys decorated with rows of artists and vendors. I start imagining myself dining at the sidewalk cafes, sitting there with Chad during the summer, spring, winter, and fall. I get this strong desire to take off my shoes and walk barefooted on the cobblestones as if I have found my new home. — Corey M.P.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there. — Beverly Cleary

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward — May Sarton

From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. — Terry Pratchett

There's one secret to hitting hard, and that is to completely dedicate your body. That's the difference between a man going forward and a man going backward, no matter how big he is. — Ray Lewis

A man who is looking backward all the time cannot move forward, he will be standing still — Sunday Adelaja

Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession? — Thomas Mullen

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had. — Gabrielle Zevin

The grandpa just stares backward at a world that no longer exists, or forward at a world beyond his comprehension. — David R. Gillham

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward. — Stanley Crouch

Sometimes you have to go backward to move forward — Elizabeth Genovese

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. — Margaret Barber

We start to sway again. We're not actually dancing, just rocking side to side. Not moving forward or backward. Just moving.
Like most of our time together, we're treading water.
Trying not to drown. — Leisa Rayven

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel. — Abraham Verghese

The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it's not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake - to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there. TS: — Pema Chodron

There is progress whether ye are going forward or backward! The thing is to move! — Edgar Cayce

Small wonder that President Obama advises us to look forward, not backward - a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance. — Noam Chomsky

[T]hose who have not been enclosed in the walls of prison without cause or provocation, can have but little idea how sweet the voice of a friend is; one token of friendship from any source whatever awakens and calls into action every sympathetic feeling; it brings up in an instant everything that is passed; it seizes the present with the avidity of lightning; it grasps after the future with the fierceness of a tiger; it moves the mind backward and forward, from one thing to another, until finally all enmity, malice and hatred, and past differences, misunderstandings and mismanagements are slain victorious at the feet of hope; and when the heart is sufficiently contrite, then the voice of inspiration steals along and whispers, [D&C 121:7-25].
[DHC3:293-294] — Joseph Smith Jr.

But, curiously, Peter did not grasp - perhaps he did not wish to grasp - the political implications of this new view of man. He had not gone to the West to study "the art of government." Although in Protestant Europe he was surrounded by evidence of the new civil and political rights of individual men embodied in constitutions, bills of rights and parliaments, he did not return to Russia determined to share power with his people. On the contrary, he returned not only determined to change his country but also convinced that if Russia was to be transformed, it was he who must provide both the direction and the motive force. He would try to lead; but where education and persuasion were not enough, he would drive - and if necessary flog - the backward nation forward. — Robert K. Massie

If you are content with yourself, you'll stop taking those little steps forward and begin taking big steps backward. — Greg Maddux

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur. — Gordon Dahlquist

Politics is like driving. To go backward put it in R. To go forward put it in D. — Tom Harkin

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward. — Muriel Spark

Studios look backward. Filmmakers look forward. — Guillermo Del Toro

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope. — Robert Frost

Life must be lived forward but only makes sense by looking backward. Only in retrospect do the pieces of the puzzle connect, revealing an intelligently orchestrated evolution. Our journey through life is in a way like walking blindfolded. — Dorit Brauer

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

Spare the stress on your neck muscles ... Looking backward takes more energy; it's more painful than looking forward! Go ahead! — Israelmore Ayivor

I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I'd be if I'd have gone forward in the first place. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The helicopter appeared so reluctant to fly forward that we even considered turning the pilot's seat around and letting it fly backward. — Igor Sikorsky

I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City. — Harold Ford Jr.

Look not back. No, not even if you see the dearest and nearest cry. Look not back, but forward. We cannot stop. If we stop we die. We have either to go forward or to go backward. We have either to progress or to degenerate. — Swami Vivekananda

Acceptance may be seen as the first step in healing, though when there is true acceptance, this is not really a step. Acceptance is there whether you step forward, backward or remain where you are. Also when acceptance is total there is no need of any further step. Acceptance will suffice. — Franco Santoro

While I occasionally enjoy a bout of nostalgia, I would generally rather dream forward than backward. — Robert Breault

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees. — Greg Iles

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a black-smith's bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of the red and green buttons, and that's what makes the world go round. — Bohumil Hrabal

Every day, you reinvent yourself. You're always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward. — James Altucher

Beauty is looking backward and urging forward, and trying desperately to pay attention to the now. — Lou Gaglia

You know, I try not to look back, because looking forward is so much better than looking backward. — Jim Bakker

Finches are seed eaters, but Dr. Daruwalla didn't know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn't know. This was the kind of Everyman he was - a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was. — John Irving

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age. — Dorothy L. Sayers

XI
I sang his name instead of song;
Over and over I sang his name:
Backward and forward I sang it along,
With my sweetest notes, it was still the same!
I sang it low, that the slave-girls near
Might never guess, from what they could hear,
That all the song was a name. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Snork Maiden looked around her. Then she leaned forward and whispered in the Fillyjonk's outstretched ear: "First you must turn seven times around yourself, mumbling a little and stamping your feet. Then you go backward to a well, and turn around, and look down in it. And then, down in the water, you'll see the person you're going to marry!" "And how do you get him up from there?" asked the Fillyjonk excitedly. — Tove Jansson

Russia on its path has oftentimes discussed and overdiscussed what had happened earlier, instead of moving forward. The result is always the same: It is very difficult to move forward when you're looking backward. — Mikhail Khodorkovsky

I'd rather look forward and dream, than look backward and regret. — James Van Praagh

The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him. — D.T. Suzuki

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. — Henry David Thoreau

Bereft of vision to guide the city's citizens forward, he could only draw them inward and backward, to encourage them to fight over imagined foes and manufactured hurt. — I.M. Savage

This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. — Kiran Desai

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space. — Dan Simmons

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers - all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off - rushing to escape bankruptcy - plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty - to press more copper pennies - to breed more headless chickens - to put more feathers in their caps - medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates - eggs and eggs of headless chickens - multitaskers - system hackers - who never know where they're heading
northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward - (where is home) - home is in the head - (but the head is cut off) - and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity. — Giannina Braschi

Perhaps making movies is a step toward being able to move backward and forward and in and out of linear time. — Eleanor Coppola

The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever. — Haruki Murakami

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

Was revolution much more than one fast kick forward in the long process called evolution? We condemened the 'cost' of revolution; but was it higher than the cost over centuries in backward, underdeveloped communities, which still covered two-thirds of the earth and which still could not guarantee their populations daily bread? — Ella Winter

Instead of Passover pointing backward to the great sacrifice by which God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, this meal pointed forward to the great sacrifice by which God was to rescue his people from their ultimate slavery, from death itself and all that contributed to it (evil, corruption, and sin). This would be the real Exodus, the real "return from exile." This would be the establishment of the "new covenant" spoken of by Jeremiah (31:31). This would be the means by which "sins would be forgiven" - in other words, the means by which God would deal with the sin that had caused Israel's exile and shame and, beyond that, the sin because of which the whole world was under the power of death. — N. T. Wright

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary - but love it — Friedrich Nietzsche

We are the owls of the weather chaw. We take it blistering, We take it all. Roiling boiling gusts, We're the owls with the guts. For blizzards our gizzards Dr tremble with joy. An ice storm, a gale, how we love blinding hail. We fly forward and backward, Upside down and flat. Do we flinch? Do we wail? Do we skitter or scutter? No, we yarp one more pellet And fly straight for the gutter! Do we screech? Do we scream? Do we gurgle? Take pause? Not on your life! For we are the best Of the best of the chaws! — Kathryn Lasky

But thought we'll know forward and we've known backward, we will never know the present. This moment and the next on and even the one that would've been right now are gone, already passed, and all we're left with are these tired bodies, the only proof that we've lived through time and survived it.
It'll be worth it, though, in the end.
Fighting for a lifetime of this. — Tahereh Mafi

In It's Only Temporary, Evan Handler confronts the ambiguities of life backward, forward, and in between. With hilarious honesty he reflects on the realization that we can start over again. It's Only Temporary is a heartfelt book for all of us who are getting younger and older at the same time. — Amy Tan

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long. — Galadrielle Allman

It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living. — John Crowe Ransom

People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past. — Gloria Whelan

You live it forward, but understand it backward. — Abraham Verghese

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else ... begin to march us steadily backward. — Patrick Stewart

Our course heavenward is like the plan of the zealous pilgrim of old, who for every three steps forward, took one backward. — Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

As for people who are politically backward, Communists should not slight or despise them, but should befriend them, unite with them, convince them and encourage them to go forward. — Mao Zedong

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

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. — David Goodis

A strong, vague persuasion that it was better to go forward than backward, and that I could go forward - that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in time open - predominated over other feelings: its influence hushed them so far, that at last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say my prayers and seek my couch. I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: I lie in the shadow of St. Paul's. — Charlotte Bronte

A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward. — Christian Nestell Bovee

But more often than not, the easy decisions are the wrong decisions, and sometimes we feel like we're going backward when we're actually moving forward. — Cecelia Ahern

It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists. — Soren Kierkegaard

It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred! — Patrick Hamilton

Step backward and assess the situation. if you can't do that, step forward and take charge. — Sydney Wilhelmy

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one. — Sylvain Cappell

I've only have time for one last lesson...
"I have you," Demandred finally growled, breathing heavily. "Who ever you are, I have you. You cannot win."
"You didn't listen to me," Lan whispered.
One last lesson. The hardest...
Demandred struck, and Lan saw his opening. Lan lunged forward, placing Demandred's sword point against his ow side and ramming himself forward onto it.
"I did not come here to win", Lan whispered, smiling, "I came here to kill you. Death is lighter that a feather."
Demandred's eyes opened wide, and he tried to pull back. Too late. Lan's sword took him straight through the throat.
The world grew dark as Lan slipped backward off the sword. He felt Nynaeve's fear and pain as he did, and he sent his love to her. — Robert Jordan

For a while, the world for me was like a set of monkey bars. I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms ... would give out, and I'd fall to the ground. — Amanda Lindhout