Retrace Your Steps Quotes & Sayings

I was stubborn like that, refusing to let my heart redefine how I operated. Looking back, there is a part of me that wants to replace the word 'stubborn' with 'reckless'; there are many things I would do differently now, but what good does it do to retrace your steps? Sometimes you simply do the things you do, and it doesn't necessarily help to pick on the "old you" by proclaiming how smart the new you is. — Dee Williams

Oh you who are born of the gods, easy is the descent into Hell. The door of darkness stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps, and come back out into the brightness above, that is the work, that is the labor. — Virgil

Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch
yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way. — Robert C. Martin

I started to sway Lexi again when I realized she was quiet. Waiting. Both of us paused on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn't go backward or even retrace my own steps, let alone Xanda's. I could only go forward. The threads of time weren't unraveling but weaving into a tapestry
a future, and a hope.
The only way to discover was to step into it. — Holly Cupala

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened. — Christina Baker Kline

Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn. — C.S. Lewis

If you're feeling frightened about what comes next, don't be. Embrace the uncertainty. Allow it to lead you places. Be brave as it challenges you to exercise both your heart and your mind as you create your own path toward happiness; don't waste time with regret. Spin wildly into your next action. Enjoy the present, each moment, as it comes, because you'll never get another one quite like it. And if you should ever look up and find yourself lost, simply take a breath and start over. Retrace your steps and go back to the purest place in your heart...where your hope lives. You'll find your way again. — Unknown

I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe. — Patti Smith

I felt like the only way for me to move on with my life was to turn this pain into a project; to retrace my steps and figure out how I got here in the first place. — Josh Einstein

There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one's life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages - most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless - on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men. No, — Albert Camus

We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience. — Paul Ricoeur

Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. — Margaret Atwood

In the time of the seventh Fire new people will emerge. They will retrace their steps to find what was left by the side of the trail long ago. Their steps will take them to the Elders, who they will ask to guide them on their journey. But many of the Elders will have fallen asleep. They will awaken to this new time with nothing to offer. Some of the Elders will be silent out of fear. But most of the Elders will be silent because no one will ask anything of them. — William Commanda

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps. — Mahatma Gandhi

Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him. — Ann Druyan

1. YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
Youth is a cliff. You leap, and repair the broken bones later.
When you're older, you draw the map, retrace your steps and find the cliff's edge again to wonder:
Would anyone ever jump if they knew how far down it went?
I jumped, once.
I'm broken in unseen places. — Douglas Clegg

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. — Arundhati Roy

Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all. — Anne Burack Sayre

But memories got left behind while you kept walking on; every time you had to retrace your steps further to return to your memories, and sometimes it was better not to turn back at all. — Dalene Matthee

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labor over Roz's life as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she's in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. — Margaret Atwood

The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict's garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on. — Emma Goldman

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What will happen when my heart stops beating?" Momo asked.
When that moment comes," said the professor, "time will stop for you as well. Or rather, you will retrace your steps through time, through all the days and nights, myths and years of your life, until you go out through the great, round, silver gate you entered by."
What will I find on the other side?"
The home of the music you've sometimes faintly heard in the distance, but by then you'll be part of it. You yourself will be a note in its mighty harmonies. — Michael Ende

In the bazaar today I noticed a shopkeeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight - but there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledge resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?
The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it, and got to his feet - and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilising this huge football of tissue as a book-rest. — J.R. Ackerley

They made us participate in their own madness,
because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. — Jeffrey Eugenides

. . . This
is not the same river at my fingertips.
There are no paths, no sunken roads
familiar in the forest, by which we can
retrace our steps,
by which we can escape
by which we can reclaim and return,
or hear the child's song running in the timothy . . . — John Daniel Thieme

Slade blinked at them, and it actually took him a moment to retrace his steps and figure out what the hell had happened in the moron's pea brain to create such a catastrophic /fail. Realizing the inebriates probably had no idea what a palanquin was - and that they had heard the 'port' part of porter and thought he meant a sweet red wine, Slade almost walked over, took Tyson's gun, and blew off his own head rather than spend one more minute surrounded by such painfully clear dumbassery. — Sara King

I mean that I'd change into something I shouldn't." Miss Saeki looks at me with great interest. "As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later." "But even if that happens, you've got to have a place you can retrace your steps to." "A place you can retrace your steps to?" "A place that's worth coming back to." Miss — Haruki Murakami

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in. — Haruki Murakami

At the crossroad in my life, I didn't know which way to go. I just mindlessly choose a random direction... then, after regretting my decision I tried to retrace my steps. However, without even realizing it the sun had already set. — Nobuyuki Fukumoto

Don't try to retrace steps. We'll find new ones. — Jessica Topper

I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. [17] — Henry David Thoreau

Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk, a soulless phantasm and nothing more. "Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!" - Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inventor of the kinesigraph camera — Catherynne M Valente

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. — Andre Breton

I think the hardest thing in life is when we see those we love turn down a wrong path, and when no entreaty will induce them to retrace their steps. — Rosa Nouchette Carey

They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again. — Nick Hornby

In life though, most beginnings are so quiet you don't even know that they are happening. Suddenly you're in the middle of things as if there were no beginning at all. Maybe you'll try to retrace your steps, but it's a useless endeavor because you're always going to miss the essential, initial clue. You might say, "Oh, here is where it all began," but you're always going to be too late. — Meg Howrey

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones. — Anais Nin

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life's instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature. — Andrew Levkoff

We have all made mistakes in our many incarnations that have caused us to retrace our spiritual steps. Some have made more mistakes than others. But it's part of the experience to spiritually fall from time to time. — Martin Barbara Moraitis Dimitri

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task. — Virgil

Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life. — Miriam Toews

A time comes when you're all alone, when you've come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It's the end of the world. Even grief, your own grief, doesn't answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who. You're not choosy at times like that, because even to weep you have to go back where everything starts all over, back among people. "What — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you're hideous, grotesque; how I loathe you!"_ — Marcel Proust

Where exactly did you lose yourself? Maybe we could retrace our steps. You could find yourself where you last saw yourself?" "Har — Tijan

The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be. — Marina Warner

The fact is that one moves through life like someone moving with a lantern in a dark woods. A bit of the path ahead is illuminated, and a bit of the path behind. But the darkness follows hard on one's steps, and envelopes our trails as one proceeds. Were one to be able, as one never is, to retrace the steps by daylight, one would find that the terrain traversed bears, in reality, little relationship to what imagination and memory pictured. We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant. — George F. Kennan

My old man always told me to retrace my steps, but what's the point if I can't remember where my feet are, let alone my footsteps... — Jonathan Dunne

Do not desert me when I need you most. And if we can't go on together,
let's retrace our steps as quickly as we can. — Dante Alighieri

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps. — Nathalie Sarraute

People give the worst advice about lost things. Retrace your steps. Pray to Saint Anthony. Think about where you last saw it. But that doesn't apply to the things that matter. Those are right in front of you, except they can't be found by looking for them. Only by looking at everything else. — Kristen Lepionka

Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind. — Aimee Mann

Once you have made a careful decision based on facts, go into action. Don't stop to reconsider. Don't begin to hesitate, worry, and retrace your steps. Don't lose yourself in self-doubting which begets other doubts. Don't keep looking back over your shoulder. — Dale Carnegie

To get ahead, sometimes you had to retrace your steps. — Ari Berk

The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub. — Virgil