Missed Chances Quotes

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

“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, Kafka on the Shore

“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, The Bell Jar

“Moments, when lost, can't be found again. They're just gone.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.”
― Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

“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, Four Quartets

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

“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 bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes; or, The Insignificant Little Habits Which Mar Domestic Happiness

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

“Don't fear death, fear the un-lived life”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“And then it hits me: I've lost you. You now rank among the things I'll always regret: opportunities lost, children never had, things I might have accomplished or done far better, lovers who have come and gone.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“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

“But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying,You could have had this instead.But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

Their life is like a garbled echo buried for all time in a sealed Mithraic chamber.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“An opportunity is like a train on the move. Once its doors have closed, it's gone. But do stick around, another one will surely be on its way; carrying with it better opportunities.”
― Naide P Obiang

“That was the missed moment. I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said," Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I'm here. Ask me before it's too late.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“We yearn for opportunities, we pray for opportunities and we seek for opportunities. The good news is that we meet opportunities. The bad news is that we miss the opportunities only to come to a later realization of missed opportunities.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“He thought of all the times he could have visited, and hadn't. All those missed opportunities to call. All those times he'd forgotten her birthday.”
― Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood

“Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.”
― James Richardson, By the Numbers

“That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Now, how far away did Abingdon Square feel, as though it and she and the restaurant, and Maria Malibran, and the sudden false rainfall by the flickering lights of the Miramar hotel sign belonged to another life, a life unlived, a life I knew had turned its back to me and was being nailed to the wall.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I’ve missed more than 13040 shots in my business and music career. There are times I’ve been trusted to create or take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”
― DON SANTO

“Miss the flight. Miss the boat. Miss the class. Miss the party. But, never ever miss your dream.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“An opportunity is like train on the move. Once its doors have closed, it’s gone. But do stick around, another one is surely on its way, carrying with it better opportunities.”
― Naide P Obiang

“Like the sand of the earth, your gifts are countless, and some are stepping on theirs without knowing.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Maybe sometimes in life you just miss your chance”
― Sophie Kinsella, The Party Crasher

“It never came down to two roads at all,
or if it did, I took the one less traveled by
for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall,
or it slipped past like a station off the air
while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.”
― James Richardson, By the Numbers

“All too often missed opportunities are in plain sight.”
― Germany Kent

“Don't you understand? You must understand!' And shudders with the ache of the thought in her head and she reaches out to grab my hand. 'I missed out on two whole years of being kissed by him,' she says.”
― Trent Dalton, Love Stories