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.
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