Top 75 Retrospect Quotes

The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.

When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things – not the great occasions – that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness.

I wrote ‘The Match,’ my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.

Those of us involved in TV have a habit of using the word ‘landmark’ a bit too readily. I have been involved in a couple of television projects that, while we were making them, felt quite landmark-ish, but that in retrospect were just good TV.

In retrospect I realize that the threat was about ego rather than the validity of the music.

In the little rural town I grew up in, I missed out on the pop music of the time, the ’80s, and now enjoy in retrospect. It’s as an adult that I’ve opened it up to dance, hip-hop, R&B, and even big pop songs.

The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.

There will always be women who say, ‘She doesn’t represent me.’ In retrospect, these things are gifts, because it forces me to step up and defend what I’m doing.

In our business, it’s hard to look at anything in retrospect and look at your accomplishments because you’re so busy thinking about the next week. What we do is 52 weeks a year.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Technically, my first acting job was in one of my videos for a song called ‘Retrospect For Life,’ which Lauryn Hill directed and featured an actress by the name of N’bushe Wright, who played my girlfriend who was about to be pregnant. I remember being so nervous about it, but now I feel like I can conquer the world with it.

PTSD occurs following a trauma that was so awful that in retrospect you don’t understand how you survived. What that causes is an extreme feeling of vulnerability that you get past but that doesn’t go away.

In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.

I think what I was unconsciously expressing in ‘Black Rainbow’ was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing ‘Mandy’ as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.

The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells – caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls.

In retrospect, I’ve become wise in playing my roles in terms of acting techniques. But looking at my old performances when I was young like what I did in ‘My Lovely Sam Soon’ or ‘Secret Garden,’ there is something fresh and daring that I want to emulate now.

My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, ‘Cooking is my job, and studying is your job.’ I think, in retrospect, she didn’t like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn’t very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.

No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

In retrospect, I have devoted my scientific life mainly to the question to what extent infectious agents contribute to human cancer, trusting that this will contribute to novel modes of cancer prevention, diagnosis and, hopefully, later on, also to cancer therapy.

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it’s not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the ’80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I’d fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Some time after ‘Gangster Squad,’ after I’d made a couple other movies, I was like, ‘In retrospect that ‘Zombieland’ experience was about as good as it can get, both between the cast and the world of the movie and the way it was received.’ I was like, ‘We should probably do another ‘Zombieland.’

I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.

Honestly, in retrospect, it probably was a little easier being an adolescent and not having people immediately know that Hef was my dad.

I was a rebellious student, called up in assembly almost every week for some misdemeanour, lots of time on the Headmistress’s office for what must have been, in retrospect, annoying behaviour.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

Well, she managed to – Barbara was capable of doing practically anything if she set her mind to it. In retrospect, I’m not surprised that Barbara managed to get collect calls through.

I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn’t saying anything.

I might say that in retrospect, looking at where the community college system is today, I think we may have gone too far. The community college system is so big, so broad, so consuming of tax money.

In my early twenties, I got the basics covered. In retrospect, one of the great things about success is that I never really had to work in a factory full-time. So that’s a blessing.

I reflected a lot, I thought a lot on my 50th birthday. It has been one of the most important birthdays in my life, not in terms of celebration but in terms of retrospect.

I think, a lot of times in Hollywood, the right idea comes along at the right time, and it becomes in retrospect, ‘Wow, why didn’t I think of that?’

I look back in retrospect, and I would never say I regret not one of my children. They are why I live.

In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight.

That’s the past. I don’t agree with retrospect.

This black hole that people talk about in my career in the ’70s, when I didn’t make any films – in retrospect, what I was doing was learning my job.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

I wanted to live in the suburbs and have a white picket fence and my own bedroom. And a staircase – I thought having a staircase meant that you were a normal family. I thought somehow if you could transplant us to the suburbs, we would become a normal family. But in retrospect, I’m so grateful I grew up in the Chelsea.

Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it’s happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I tried four times to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama before I got accepted. I started when I was 17, which was too young, in retrospect, and finally went when I was 21. I just kept plugging away. Determined? Yeah, I think I was.

Persistence is a pretty important part of making it in this business, which, in retrospect, is the easy part. Maintaining a profile is the difficult part of the job. Somehow or another, I muddled through that system and somehow am around to still enjoy playing for people.

I know that when you are experiencing failure, it’s pretty damn painful. It is easy in retrospect to wax poetic about it. But in the moment, you don’t think you will survive, let alone have the time to reflect on how valuable those lessons will be for you in the future.

I’m fascinated with acting now. In retrospect, I was only beginning to chip off the tip of the iceberg with how far I can go or what I was exploring inside of me that I hadn’t touched in a while as far as emotional headspaces.

Sometimes when people are attached to a project, they need persuading to stay attached, and then, in retrospect, they’re not the right person.

When I was in my early twenties, I used to grow all sorts of very weird beards. All of them awful in retrospect. I had Civil War beards for a while, then Mennonite beards.

I didn’t want a day job anymore, so I somehow made the jewelry line work. Now that I look back on it, it was, like, the dumbest idea ever. Everyone and their mother has a jewelry line, so in retrospect, maybe not the smartest fallback plan. But it ended up working out great!

It was weird that most people knew me as someone let go from ‘SNL.’ I had the best time there, and in retrospect, it was the perfect amount of time. The only thing that matters is what you do with yourself in that moment after. If you decide, ‘I’m the girl who was fired from ‘SNL,’ you’re just that.

It is obvious, in retrospect, to lean on those who love us most. With depression, in part because of the shame attached to it, it’s harder to be honest.

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those ‘old-timers’ ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of ‘Black Mecca’ are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

My dad is and was very funny and had a really dry sense of humor, which, as a kid, seemed un-fun. But in retrospect, it’s kind of hilarious.

I find that I’m extremely unattracted to anything that’s humorless. There is writing that is entirely serious, and it doesn’t ring true to me, because I think, oftentimes, life is very, very funny. Even the worst, most humiliating, savage disappointments in retrospect have elements of bleak humor.

In retrospect, I never thought of myself as conceited – I never even wore makeup or styled my hair until I was an adult – but having Bell’s Palsy made me hyper-aware of the way I looked. I became completely depressed, never wanting to get out of bed or even answer the phone.

Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.

Basketball is my first love. If my health had permitted me, I would still be playing, but I am glad in retrospect that everything happened the way it did.

If getting young people computer-literate through putting school systems online is a no-brainer, at least in retrospect, getting older people and those in rural areas online can be a tougher nut to crack.

Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.

In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the ‘Feminine Mystique.’

My main objective with every album is to capture a moment in time, which usually makes the whole process very relaxing. I only discover in retrospect when looking back at the songs how my life is going!

‘Pasadena’ erred on the side being too dark. That was probably the one thing about it, in retrospect, why it didn’t get picked up.

I wasn’t going off to New York to be more famous than my father, but in retrospect, that certainly was driving me. He was famous in Philadelphia, but it was also really important to him to be famous. And to a certain extent, I got some of that, even though there were parts of it that horrified me.

Asked at the hearing why she hadn’t pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn’t know, about domestic terrorist threats, Rice acted as though the question was an odd one: it wasn’t her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.

My father said I should become a doctor and do science in my spare time, which in retrospect might not have been a bad idea, but I wasn’t interested in taking care of people’s ills.

In retrospect, I’m grateful for the break-up of my marriage because it forced me to deal with all the buried issues I probably wouldn’t have otherwise faced. I’m a better, kinder, happier person today because of the spiritual and emotional growth I’ve experienced.

History will do what it always does. It will make ignorant statements, in retrospect, seem shortsighted and discriminatory, and the women who will serve their country bravely in the jobs that are now opening up will prove them wrong. Just like we always have.

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn’t force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.

I didn’t think of myself as beautiful, but, in retrospect, I guess I was.

I have never heard anyone say This is it. I know right now is the high point of my life. It will never get any better. Only in retrospect do we recognize the best times and of course then it is too late.

Righteousness is easy in retrospect.

It’s no fun to be miscast. The times I’ve done parts that I don’t feel, in retrospect, I was great for – it’s a very bad feeling.

Sure, I’ve been a victim, but in retrospect, most of it has been of my own making. I allowed it to happen.