Quotes & Sayings About Looking Backward

Her dad brought his hands together and popped a knuckle.
"Trevor," Frances said soothingly, rubbing her hand on his back. But she was looking hard at me over her glasses, telling me upstanding citizens did not act this way.
When we were kids, that look from Frances could make Lori and her brother behave, and sometimes even my brothers, but I never seemed to get the message.
"I saw you coming out of the woods," Lori's dad shouted at me. "Together!"
"We weren't rolling in the leaves or anything. Look, no evidence." I put my other hand on Lori's other shoulder and turned her around backward, hoping against hope
she didn't have scratches from the tree on her bare back, or bark on her butt.
"Get your hands off my daughter. — Jennifer Echols

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

Life turns on small choices.
A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.
A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.
A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.
A word spoken with the best intentions.
Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.
David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero. — William Carmichael

Kelly looked at the cop, then sighed. "What a cluster. I take it you haven't been killing young women and leaving their half-eaten bodies in the desert?"
Adam was ticked. I could tell it even if he was looking like a reasonably calm businessman. Adam's temper was the reason he wasn't one of Bran's werewolf poster boys. When angered, he often gave in to impulses he wouldn't otherwise have given in to.
"Sorry to disappoint you," Adam told Kelly in silky tones. "But I prefer rabbits. Humans taste like pork." And then he smiled. Kelly took an involuntary step backward.
Tony gave Adam a sharp look. "Let's not make things worse, if we can help it, gentlemen. — Patricia Briggs

Having set its mark on the generation before Cocteau's, symbolism expressed a form of inner dissidence confronting the narrow-minded materialism and utilitarian obsession of the industrial revolution, and hence a reaction to triumphant naturalism, in literature at least. Nourished by medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic art, symbolism, probably the last great backward-looking movement hatched in the West, had given rise to a desire to explore the secrets of the world and the confines of the soul. Beyond its androgynous Mercuries, its pale Narcissuses, and its Orpheuses borne by rosaries of angels, it gave rise to a whole misty alchemy wherein some found their way into esotericism and even into the religious, since the Universe was only the symbol of another world into which entrance was gained not only through poetry, spiritualism, dreams, and the Ideal, but also via the play of analogies and the study of ciphers. — Claude Arnaud

I call these lessons 'learned on the fly' because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying to not lose sight of the ball or fail to notice the sensation of gravel from the warning track under his cleats as he knowingly approaches the blindside impact of an outfield wall. His focused intention guides him into trying to make the catch that will save the game for his team, his city and the harmony of the moment, despite the foreboding threat of a pending collision. Decisions in these situations are made in an instant. One weighs the purpose of the game, the success of the catch and one's own safety of survival in a fleeting moment, and in all hopes one lives to tell about it in the glow of great success. — Michael Delaware

How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time. — Charles Caleb Colton

Suggestion of the Communist Manifesto was 'abolition of all right of inheritance.' Looking backward upon the past history of estate taxes, we have to realize that they more and more have approached the goal set by Marx. Estate taxes of the height they have already attained for the upper brackets are no longer to be qualified as taxes. They are measures of expropriation. — Ludwig Von Mises

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. — Charlotte Bronte

It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are trying to stop everyone who's moving forward, and a few are marching backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn't know we were looking for, and yet continue to contain contradictions for generations. (Pandora's Box and the Volunteer Police Force) — Rebecca Solnit

The thing about rowing, you face backward. Always looking into the past, never the future. Always seeing what you're losing, never what you've got to gain. — Joe Abercrombie

You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward. — Frank Herbert

Those who, either from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reach, have from that time not only ceased to advance, and improve in their performances, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men who have lived upon their principal, till they are reduced to beggary, and left without resources. — Joshua Reynolds

These are islands in time - with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting. — Harvey Broome

I would bend over backward to be back on Grey's. Any day, I'll choose lying in bed with Katherine Heigl looking over me over getting thrown against walls by supernatural persons at 5 in the morning. — Jeffrey Dean Morgan

..the description of the ministry as a ministry of the word refers to the content of the message rather than the manner of its presentation. That is to say, the Christian minister is called to minister Christ Himself as the eternal Word incarnate for us men and for our salvation. The focus of attention is not preaching or teaching as such; otherwise a false importance is give to the spoken word of Man. It is the theme and content of preaching and teaching. By means of the ministry Christ Himself is handed over to others to be received and then passed on by them as God's own Word of revelation and redemption. Secondarily, the ministry of the word refers to the ministry of the prophetic and apostolic testimony to Jesus Christ, the true and incarnate Word. That is to say, the Christian minister is called to pass on to others that which is attested concerning Jesus Christ by the forward-looking witness of the Old Testament and the backward-looking witness of the New. — G. W. Bromiley

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

I do not like to dwell on the past. Life is ahead of us. If we spend too much time looking backward, we can't see where we are going! — R.J. Palacio

Art need not be intended. It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence. — Robert Henri

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

The Fomorians skittered backward, away from me, looking justifiably confused. I mean, really, how many human women actually run to them? And I was a human woman covered in swamp yuck, with wild red hair sticking out in matted hunks and arms flailing like a demented Bride of Frankenstein. I'd run from me. — P.C. Cast

Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us. — Edward Bellamy

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. 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. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. — Terry Pratchett

There is little to be gained from looking backward with disapproval at the consistency of human folly except to notice how each generation thinks itself immune to its predecessor's mistakes. — John H. Makin

I used to belong to a family unit, with a foster mom and dad and my little sister, Bean, but that's over and I don't want to talk about what happened , or how unfair it was. Not yet. The less said about that the better, because if there's one thing I learned from Ryter it's that you can't always be looking backward or something will hit you from the front. — Rodman Philbrick

I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole. — Miguel Syjuco

Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward. — Eric Roth

To discover your real questions, simply take a time-out. Stop looking ahead of yourself at where you're going or backward at where you've been. When you do stop, there's a sense of going nowhere. There's a sense of gap, which is a tremendous relief. You can simply breathe and be who you are. — Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

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

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible. — Ludwig Von Mises

We should avoid being backward-looking, concerned with restoration and reaction, for it is the last few centuries that have spawned the pox that is now devouring us.
It is a matter of returning to archaic and ancestral values, while at the same time envisioning the future as something more than the extension of the present. — Guillaume Faye

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence. — William Faulkner

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

Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward and forward. — Marge Piercy

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

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

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

A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life. — Henry Ward Beecher

The people in 'July, July' do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion. — Tim O'Brien

She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material, without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if she were under a vow to be different from all other women; and Will sat down opposite her at two yards' distance, the light falling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile, with its defiant curves of lip and chin. Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there. Dorothea for the moment forgot her husband's mysterious irritation against Will: it seemed fresh water at her thirsty lips to speak without fear to the one person whom she had found receptive; for in looking backward through sadness she exaggerated a past solace. — George Eliot

Fifteen minutes, a myriad of cups, kleenexes and freshly-vacuumed floor mats and seat cushions later, Kay had the interior of the limousine looking ship-shape. Inching backward out of the car on her knees, she caught a glimpse of one last bit of trash she'd missed hiding under the driver's seat. Lowering her chest to the floor, she stretched her arm under the seat as far as it would go. She grabbed the item and pulled it out and raised herself up from her crouched position. She took one look at the used condom swinging from her fingers, screamed and flung it across the top of the front seat, where it stuck to the air conditioner vents on the dash. She knelt there staring at the thin latex mess, a million scenarios racing through her mind. — Delora Dennis

Looking backward at what has been lost, I feel sad, then indifferent, and at last relieved. — Mason Cooley

Memory - uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable - is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we're inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can't be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Only by looking backward are we able answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive? — Stephanie Kallos

I like Rowe's dad. "We'll see you again for dinner, okay?" I turn around to walk backward to answer him, doing my best to fall somewhere between fast and slow with my walk because, hell, I don't want my pitchers hating me. "Looking forward to it, Tom. I'll see you at sex." Motherfucker. I just said sex — Ginger Scott

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived - forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position. — Soren Kierkegaard

Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline. — Jeff Goodell

I assumed that looking back reminded older guys of what they had shot at and missed, the what-ifs, the good memories, the bad, the people left behind, the people who moved on. — Dan Groat

Nimitz's quiet but firm action in immediately addressing his command was as significant a decision as any he made in those early days. Reaching out to all concerned and assuring them of their worth worked wonders to shore up morale, put as much of the Pearl Harbor disaster behind them as possible, and get his command looking forward instead of backward. Still, in the months ahead, they were all going to be spread thin. — Anonymous

The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward. — Soren Kierkegaard

Edward Bellamy's eugenic utopian novel, "Looking Backward" was the inspiration for American Progressivism. — A.E. Samaan

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward. — Iggy Pop

If people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn't we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we are predictably irrational - and we clearly are- why couldn't we also be predictably transcendent? — Daniel H. Pink

It is hopeless trying to go forward when you are looking backward. — Nancy Astor

I literally had a very articulate, though highly impaired, homeless man say to me, "Smokey! I love you! What's happening with Jacob?" Here's a guy living on the street, but he finds a way to watch Lost! And I'm looking at him, thinking, Your priorities are completely ass-backward! — Titus Welliver

The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that American will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure ... — Irwin Shaw

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me. — Douglas Coupland

He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn't. It sat out in the open like anything else. — Carol Shields

History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten — Yuval Noah Harari

As I have said, the Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pain. It rarely, or ambiguously, answers the backward-looking question "Why?" Instead, it raises the very different, forward-looking question, "To what end?"We are not put on earth merely to satisfy our desires, to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.We are here to be changed, to be made more like God in order to prepare us for a lifetime with him. And that process may be served by the mysterious pattern of all creation: pleasure sometimes emerges against a background of pain, evil may be transformed into good, and suffering may produce something of value. — Philip Yancey

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward. — Charles Yu

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now? — Karen Joy Fowler

I have a daughter and I have granddaughters and I will never vote to let a group of backward-looking ideologues cut women's access to birth control. We have lived in that world, and we are not going back, not ever — Elizabeth Warren

The Suns, meanwhile, appeared to be hoisting a white flag over the Arizona desert. With a 12-22 record at the time, they were clearing out big contracts for salary-cap relief and a chance to start over again the following summer. We are taking a step backward in the immediate run, .. But we're certainly looking forward to the future. — Bryan Colangelo

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.

The aspirant who frequently measures how far he has advanced, or retrograded, upon this path, or how long he has stood still, is seeking something to be gained for himself, is looking all the time at himself. He is measuring the ego instead of trying to transcend it altogether. He is clinging to self, instead of obeying Jesus' injunction to deny it. Looking at the ego, he unwittingly stands with his back to the Overself. If he is ever to become enlightened, he must turn round, cease this endless self-measurement, stop fussing over little steps forward or backward, let all thoughts about his own backwardness or greatness cease, and look directly at the goal itself. — Paul Brunton

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward. — Josef Albers

The decision to let go of that which has completed its course in your experience is even more important than the decision to welcome new ideas. You cannot walk forward by looking backward. New wine cannot be put into old bottles, for the Bible states that the old bottles will break. You intuitively know what should depart from your life. — Raymond Charles Barker

The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn't Michael at all. It was her. You fool ... And which one was he? The Magician? She'd thought he was. She'd thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his cross tree. Unable to go backward or forward — Janet Fitch

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

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

Oh, you know me, Jules," she answered. "I do not like to dwell on the past. Life is ahead of us. If we spend too much time looking backward, we can't see where we are going!" Much — R.J. Palacio

Too much looking backward ... is bad for progress. — Henry Ward Beecher

Looking backward always presents an overdetermined depiction of fate; by this perspective we leave out of focus the possibilities of action which existed at the time. — Reinhard Bendix

Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. — Kristin Hannah

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you. — Burt Lancaster

Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light ... galaxies that existed before our time. — Richard Preston

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

We all know what we should have done as we look backward. Yet looking backward further still, we may say that all goes as the Wild Magic wills. And we must look forward if we are to live long enough to look backward. — Mercedes Lackey

I got to get back to work. I'll be looking for you to come entertain me soon, Becca Lynn," Cage said in a low whisper then stepped around
her and headed out the door without a backward glance.
The second the door closed behind him Becca pulled out a kitchen chair and sank down into it with a loud thump. "OHMYGOD!" she
squealed. "I swear I think I just creamed my damn panties. — Abbi Glines

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

Don't get me wrong. It's a lovely idea. It's very romantic. 'Just believe' and you can experience magic. It's why grandmothers the world over knit the word Believe into blankets for their grandchildren." His elbows resting on the arms of his chair, Mister Fox waved his hands in a vague, circular gesture. "There's just one little problem. It's completely wrong. It's backward. When you believe in something, you stop questioning it. You stop looking for answers and ignore other possibilities. Only minds that are truly open to possibility can see magic. It's people who aren't sure - of themselves, of the world, of their place in the world - who can see and experience magic. — Adam Shaughnessy

You can't go forward if you're looking backward. You run into walls that way. — Karen Marie Moning

Stop looking backward. Life isn't lived in that direction. Your future isn't in that direction. It's forward, out into the horizon ahead of you. — F.E. Feeley Jr.

And Phoebe and Sebastian went their separate ways, to the blacksmith shop and the library, after several backward glances that weren't coordinated enough to allow either to know that the other one was looking. — Jean Ferris

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can. — Charles Handy

Looking backward through life, one can see the points of change like great locks through which one glides on a flood wave, so smoothly, on such irresistible power that one is hardly aware of any movement. But life is never the same again. One has gone through the lock and lives on a new level. — Mary O'Hara