Top 75 Retrospect Quotes

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.

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

Growing up, I wanted to be a musician. My mother, in typical Filipino-mom fashion, would always make me go up in front of people at parties to sing. Back then, as a kid, I was mortified. In retrospect, I see that doing that as a child helped me get over my fear of being in front of people.

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 do think it’s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.

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.

In retrospect, the populist panic may have been overblown. Regarding Brexit, for example, the shock exaggerated its meaning. Because it was so unexpected, it became a sensation.

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.

To be candid, I think, in retrospect, it was a mistake to work at AOL when I did. I think I had rose-colored glasses about the opportunity to reinvent AOL.

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

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.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on ‘The Arsenio Hall Show.’ It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

There were a number of false starts where I was trying to make solo albums. They would get constantly folded into group efforts. In retrospect, I can say fair enough, that you call yourself a band member, and you’ve got to step up to the plate when the need arises.

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, 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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

The first song that I remember writing in its entirety was when I was 9 years old. I wrote it on a bus, on a field trip. It was called ‘Mystery Man,’ and in retrospect, it was the beginning of my exploration of what it was like to have a man in your life, because I didn’t.

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.

To me, in retrospect, it was amazing that ‘Seinfeld’ was a show that had such mass appeal. At first it was a disaster in the ratings, but then it became a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know if that’s possible anymore, but I don’t try for that.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot – too much, in retrospect – about the rich.

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

Honestly, in retrospect, when I referred to the actors from ‘Prince’ as non-actors or non-professionals, it was actually a great disservice to them. The fact is that they are all actors and should be viewed that way by the industry. It was our casting process that was non-professional.

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!

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.

The Eagles ended on a rather abrupt note, although in retrospect I realize now that it had been ending for quite some time.

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.

You know, ‘Peepshow,’ in retrospect that seems like a good fit for me, but in the beginning, I’m sure you remember, nobody was sure if the show was going to last. Everybody was like, ‘What are you doing? You can’t sing, and you can’t dance. What are you doing in this show?’

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

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!

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.

I really tend to write in retrospect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present.

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.

Are the things that now, in retrospect, with what I’ve seen happen to my company, would I have done some things differently? I think – I think we all would do – we would do a number of things differently.

In retrospect, I’m really shocked at how far I put my heart out there on the line with ‘Prima Donna’. I seem to have this knack for being able to accomplish that.

‘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.

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.

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.

In retrospect, ‘Pulp Fiction’ isn’t just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.

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 think there’s something about going on a hike and looking at a city view or looking at the ocean that brings you back to earth and kind of reminds you that your problems are quite small in retrospect.

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’ve had a number of near misses during my travels that in retrospect seem of greater concern than they did at the time. I guess that is what happens with age.

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.

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.

Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music.

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.

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.

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

In retrospect, I think I had some kind of learning disorder. I could kind of charm my way through grade school, but in high school… I could never seem to grasp things.

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.

There might have been a point in my career where, because people have been telling me I’m an activist, I took on that label. But in retrospect, I don’t think that’s what I am – or what I’ve been – just because I’m vocal about my identity sometimes.

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.

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.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

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 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.

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

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.’

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.

In any walk of life, it’s very easy to judge people’s actions in retrospect.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early ’60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.