Quotes & Sayings About Looking Ahead And Not Back

When one door closes another one opens but if you keep looking back at the closed one you'll never see the one that's open ahead of you. — Christopher Sharp

Displaying a bland, even an eerie, disregard for what appeared to be the facts of the situation, he fell back on an old habit of looking ahead to the next defeat. — Loudon Wainwright III

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents. — Alan Lightman

The next time you get into your car, notice the size of the front windscreen, compared to the size of the rear view mirror. This is because what is up ahead is more important than what you have already passed. Where you are going is far more important than where you have been. If you let your thoughts dwell in the past, then you will get stuck in the past, and when looking back, you cannot see where you are going and can easily lose your way. Don't let one setback ruin your life. Don't let losing that job, that relationship, that house define who you are. Each step on the journey is simply another step on the road to your divine destiny. — Rev. J Martin

Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said. — J.D. Salinger

The past is to be learned from but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead and remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. — Jeffrey R. Holland

But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn't know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not. — Hanya Yanagihara

The moral of the story is even though that seemed like the end of the world back then, right now I can look back on it and laugh. And if anyone is going through something similar right now just know it will get better. — Phil Lester

Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun. Fairyland-Below is the shadow of Fairyland, and this is where magic gets born and grows up and sows its oats before coming out into the world. The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. Before Halloween, we lived in the upper world, where the light makes us insubstantial, thin, scraps of thought and shade. We weren't unhappy - we made good magic for the world, sportsmanlike stuff. We reflected our bodies' deeds, and when our brothers and sisters went to sleep, we had our own pretty lives, our shadow loves, our shadow markets, our shadow races. But we had no idea, no idea how it could be under the world with our Hollow Queen. And now we shall never go back. — Catherynne M Valente

Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes, traveling the train through clear Moroccan skies. Ducks and pigs and chickens call, animal carpet wall to wall, American ladies five-foot tall in blue. Sweeping cobwebs from the edges of my mind, had to get away to see what we could find. Hope the days that lie ahead, bring us back to where they've led, listen not to what's been said to you. Wouldn't you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express? Wouldn't you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express, they're taking me to Marrakesh. All aboard the train, all aboard the train ... — Graham Nash

You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false. — Andre Aciman

Wait," I said looking around. "How do we get off of this thing and onto the island?"
Criminy's mouth compressed into a thin line. Then his lips started to twitch. Then he started to shake. And then he cackled, head thrown back, as if it was the funniest joke he'd ever heard.
"Darling, I have no idea whatsoever," he said, "I didn't think that far ahead. — Delilah S. Dawson

Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead. — Alan Brennert

Would you - "
"Yes."
"You don't know what I was going to ask."
"Don't I?" A ghost of a smile worked his lips, and he turned his head just a fraction toward me, looking at me through a lock of hair. "The answer is yes anyways."
"I should make you do part of my community service," I mused, kicking back in the chair across the table from him. "That would serve you right."
"Go ahead. I can't say no to you either, darling."
"What do you mean, either?"
He smiled - though it was more of a smirk this time. "Either, one or the other, all of the above. — Anne Zoelle

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are. — Taylor Mali

But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven't completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow's udder. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But the problem with looking back when you should be walking ahead is that you usually end up walking into something that hurts. — Megan Hart

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

As I said before, the marriage had troubles in it, which is easy to say ... When we were both mad, we would have something to say to each other. It wasn't love, but it beat indifference, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, it would come to love ...
We had often enough the pleasure of making up, because we fell out often enough. But now, looking back, it is hard to say why we fell out, or what we fell out about, or why whatever we fell out about ever mattered. But even then it was something hard to say.
One time we were fussing and Nathan looked at me right in the middle of it and said, "Hannah, what in the hell got us started on this?"
I said, "I don't know."
"Well, I don't know either," he said. "So I think I'm going to quit."
"Well, go ahead and quit," I said.
He said, "I already did." And that was the last word that time. — Wendell Berry

I don't know why, but I suddenly felt a long way away from everybody I had known and loved when I was a girl. I missed people. For a minute I stood there and wished I could get back to that time. Then with my next thought I understood clearly that I couldn't do that. No. But it came to me then that my life did not remotely resemble the life I thought I'd have when I had been young and looking ahead to things. — Raymond Carver

Every time I learn this, the truer it gets: we can only live our lives looking ahead, and we can only understand them looking back. — Kee Sloan

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

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

I don't do a lot of looking back; I tend to look ahead. — Marie Helvin

She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead - every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it? — Ayn Rand

Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard. 24Yet God freely and graciously declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. 25For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past, 26for he was looking ahead and including them in what he would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness, for he himself is fair and just, and he declares sinners to be right in his sight when they believe in Jesus. — Anonymous

You want to fall in love with a shoe, go ahead. A shoe can't love you back, but, on the other hand, a shoe can't hurt you too deeply either. And there are so many nice-looking shoes. — Allan Sherman

00 11 20 14 CC Apollo 13, Houston.
00 11 20 18 CDR Go ahead, Houston.
00 11 20 19 CC Okay. Looking at our computations back here, we
show you about 55 450 and going out rapidly now.
00 11 20 33 CDR Well, Hal might be a little bit off.
00 11 20 36 CC Okay.
00 11 20 37 CMP We have a sign underneath our LEB DSKY that "my
name is Hal."
00 11 20 45 CC I can't imagine how that got there. Just remember,
you have to be nice to Hal.
00 11 20 55 CMP We will. — NASA

The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. I trudged along through each day in its turn, rarely looking up, eyes locked on the never-ending swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time. — Haruki Murakami

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead. — Suzy Menkes

(Phillipians 3:14) No Lots wife here. No looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah here. Paul knows it is out there in the future, up ahead wherever heaven is taking us, that we will win "the prize" of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. — Jeffrey R. Holland

If you're always looking back at what you've lost, you'll never discover the treasure that lies just up ahead. — J.E.B. Spredemann

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines. — Thomas Lynch

The hallway felt like time itself, and Patricia Buckingham and I were standing at opposite ends-her looking back on all she'd seen, me wondering what lay ahead. — Ally Carter

Stop looking back when your future is ahead of you. — Ricky Maye

I love young people because they are always looking ahead, and older people because they can look back; and both make sense of the world so economically. You can learn so much from the wisdom of the young and the old. I'm just in between! — Polixeni Papapetrou

Even if a minefield or the abyss should lie before me, I will march straight ahead without looking back. — Zhu Rongji

Yoh: ...I watched the video of your match...The one where you lost and cried so much. When I saw that, I thought that I wouldn't mind coaching you. You face everything head-on, and when you're down, you always get back up, looking straight ahead...I'm glad that I'm the one you asked to coach you...I'm glad I'm the one you bumped into, that day we met........I must still have a fever. I'm not making sense...

Haruna: Can I kiss you!? I know it's not the best time!! But what you said was so sweet!! — Kazune Kawahara

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead. — Ted Koppel

like licorice strips. Nate links his fingers with mine. His bad arm is still strapped up. The forecast from the doctors hasn't improved, but Nate's demeanor has. He's come to a certain peace with the whole thing. The windshield's cold behind my back, the sky endless ahead. "Lucy," he says, looking down at his arm, "thanks, and I mean it. I can't get through this without you. I know that now." I remember that day, the fight that stripped us both bare, — Teagan Kade

Thank you, but I have never had a large capacity for grief. I prefer looking ahead to looking back. Swimming to Hong Kong limited my soul as well as my body. So trying new things, even at my age, holds no fear for me. I suspect you have the same spirit of independence and adventure. — Ian Hamilton

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. — Alan Lightman

How long since he'd been back home? Ten years? Fifteen? He'd stopped keeping track around the time he'd finally stopped looking over his shoulder. At the time, leaving had seemed too good to be true. He'd spent months feeling like he was half a step ahead of some nameless specter; like if he let his guard down, even for a second, whatever it was would drag him right back where he'd come from. — Laura Oliva

The best thing is to walk on the right path without looking back, without knowing who is following you because you must walk with your own speed, with your own freedom! Your followers will catch you or your ideas somehow somewhere ahead, somewhere in time! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

That is faith. You cannot measure it with weights and doses like your herbs. You cannot classify it in your books, or test it with chemics. But it is there, more powerful than any bit of old world science. Only the Creator can see the path ahead. He makes of us what he wants - what the world needs - us to be. But we can have a glimpse, looking back. — Peter V. Brett

You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"
"Yeah."
"Well," he said, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter. — Jonathan Tropper

There'll be moments in life, sweet pea, that stand out in your memories like a photograph. Scenes captured perfectly in your mind, frozen in time with each detail as colorful as it was that first time you saw it. 'Flashbulb memories,' some people call them," she'd told me, her eyes crinkling up and nearly disappearing in a face etched with too many laugh lines to count. "Most people don't recognize those moments as they happen. They look back fifty years later, and realize that those were the most important parts of their entire life. But at the time, they're so busy looking ahead to what's coming down the line or worrying about their future, they don't enjoy their present. Don't be like them, sweet pea. Don't get so caught up in chasing your dreams that you forget to live them. — Julie Johnson

Where did you go to, if I may ask?' said Thorin to Gandalf as they rode along.
To look ahead,' said he.
And what brought you back in the nick of time?'
Looking behind,' said he. — J.R.R. Tolkien