Quotes & Sayings About Missed Chances

You may never be entirely happy; few people are. You may never achieve your heart's desire in this world, for people seldom do. Sit by enough deathbeds, Branza, and you will hear your fill of stories of missed chances, and wrong turnings, and spurned opportunities for love. It is required of you only to be here, not to be happy. — Margo Lanagan

Moments, when lost, can't be found again. They're just gone. — Jenny Han

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories ... — Geoff Dyer

If you ask people what they've always wanted to do, most people haven't done it. That breaks my heart. — Angelina Jolie

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Ellie's head sinks into her hands, and she weeps for the unknown Boot, for Jennifer, for chances missed and a life wasted. She cries for herself, because nobody will ever love her like he loved Jennifer, and because she suspects that she is spoiling what might have been a perfectly good, if ordinary, life. She cries because she is drunk and in her flat and there are few advantages to living on your own except being able to sob uninhibitedly at will. — Jojo Moyes

Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances. — Stephen King

No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That's what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together. — Paul Auster

Any fighter knows that regret that doesn't inform your future is wasted emotion. If you lose and dwell on the missed opportunity rather than the chances to come, you're finished. — Craig Lancaster

One example of an uniquely Sethian approach towards initiation is for the initiate to regard his or her own life with the same urgency and need experienced as in a war zone in which every move and action must be weighed yet determined swiftly, as necessity dictates. During battle, situations such as missed opportunity, lingering sentimentality, second or third chances, or excessive contemplation would be fatal; and so it is on the sinister path. — Zeena Schreck

I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything ... — Ann Beattie

Then it comes to him - how you can't return to a place you've never been to, can't recapture what you never had. The chances you miss stay missed forever. — Paul Russell

But stupidity is one of two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances. 18 — Stephen King

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by. — Kristin Hannah

a paradox; the best opportunities we want are the best opportunities we miss; the best opportunities we wanted, are the best opportunities we missed and the best opportunities we seek for stay far away from us. In the end, we only settle for any opportunity. Life! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

A missed opportunity repentance only leaves behind — Eve Berlin

However late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made or talents you think you don't have, or however far from home and family and God you feel you have traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ's Atonement shines. — Jeffrey R. Holland

I think I could look back through the past few years at missed opportunities and stuff, but one thing I have learned is not to dwell on missed chances or times where you have failed. — Michael Chang

I never cut my neighbor's throat;
My neighbor's gold I never stole;
I never spoiled his house and land;
But God have mercy on my soul!
For I am haunted night and day
By all the deeds I have not done;
O unattempted loveliness!
O costly valor never won! — Marguerite Wilkinson

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library. — Haruki Murakami

[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do. — James Robertson

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction
every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour. — Sylvia Plath

Goodbye Brad, missed you at the Tour and Vuelta. NOT! I so nailed you with my book. I killed your last chances to ever ride a grand tour. Watching you beg in the press was fun, it really was. — Chris Froome

However many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made, ... you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Don't fear death, fear the un-lived life — Natalie Babbitt

I'm not going to single individuals out but Yakubu has missed loads of great chances — Alan Brazil

It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him
his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed. — Lauren Oliver

As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life's moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity. — Mitch Albom

When we lose someone, it is not the loss that makes us sad. It is the thought of all our missed chances. — Ira N. Barin

Life is like an 6-slice apple pie at a 12-guest dinner banquet. If you just sit back and wait for it to come to you, chances are, you're going to miss dessert. — Donald L. Hicks

I can't fault my players. We created a lot of chances but we missed out on a victory because of the woodwork and goalkeeper Bonano, who did very well. — Frank Rijkaard

The past, for everyone, is full of missed chances, surviving to understand them, if not set them straight, is one of the things that makes the next breath worth taking. — Le Ly Hayslip

Every country gets fired up to play us. They played well. I thought when it was 2-1 that we had some chances to make it 3, 4-1. He made some saves and we just missed some shots. They got a break on their second, and the third period I thought we had a lot of chances, he made some big saves. We got it done in the shootout. — Dany Heatley

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden. — T. S. Eliot

Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss. — Eric Roth

In life we don't always get what we want; hopes and dreams get washed away so easily, hearts are broken, chances are missed, and we always seem to end up right back where we started. — Rebecah McManus

Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed. — Hilary Mantel

When his mind turned to look back at the memories of a life gone off the track, everything appeared murky, like looking through a stagnant pond, covered completely with green algae, black beneath with the overabundance of bacteria and rot that made it incapable of supporting any other life besides. Through the murk he saw love, love that wasn't cultivated, love that was left to wither and die on the vine in his vain attempt to find happiness. Happiness that he didn't even know he might have had in his hands, had he done his part.
He saw missed opportunities, roads not taken, chances that asked too much of him. And his life, like a beautiful room that slowly emptied of all furnishings until it came down to only himself and the worn soiled carpet beneath him, the walls darkening to make the hell he thought would be his happiness - the hell that was his life. — Jason Huffman-Black

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Unable to help himself, he offered her a smile and stared into those eyes as he tapped his mouth. "I think you missed. — J.M. Stewart

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. — C. G. Jung

The other is missed chances. — Stephen King

The day before you died was the longest, slowest day ever. It gave you more time than you could possibly want to contemplate all the things you'd got wrong, the chances you'd missed, the errors you'd made. It was long enough to convince the most hopeful person that there was no point in anything. — Juliet Marillier

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them — W.S. Merwin

If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late! — Michael Chabon

Our biggest regrets are not for the things we have done but for the things we haven't done — Chad Michael Murray

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work a) that you need most to do and b) the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement b). — Frederick Buechner

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who thinks about the most, because he wished he'd been more like Mat when he was young.
If he'd been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn't have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only came along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it? — Marcus Sedgwick