Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.
I like to think that my finest hour is still ahead of me, so I can look forward rather than look backward.
I'm always making Butcher Holler sound like the most backward part of the United States-and I think maybe it is.
There may be some backward countries where the mass of the people are on a subsistence level and where, as an aftermath of wars or partial crop failures, the standard of living has to be drastically reduced, but this certainly is not the case in our prosperous nations.
You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
I had an experience that was kind of backward. Instead of thinking that photography was a step down, it brought me a step up, to transpose and modify things.
I'm going to change my image - backward caps, the lot.
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.
I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.
Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together.
The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.
No More Avengers! There's nothing new to get out of it - I want to go forward, not backward.
Winning times in the New York City Marathon have not dropped all that much over the years, but rather U.S. runners went backward. In 1983, there were 267 U.S. men who broke 2:20 in a marathon, and by 2000 that number was down to 27.
Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.
I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.
In spite of this fact, the Western powers have never given sufficient importance to the Muslim world. They have always been inclined to treat it as a big backward and lethargic child.
Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.
I'm treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.
There is progress whether ye are going forward or backward! The thing is to move!
Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is 'grainy' - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right).
The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.
Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.
I can bend my wrist down to my forearm. I can wrench my fingers backward until they rest on my hand. A hitchhiker's thumb might arc into a 90-degree angle; mine will go to 135.
I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.
Of course the orders all converge backward in time, to different degrees.
I'm really rubbish with technology; I'm super backward! I think I got a mobile phone last out of all my friends. I really worried about people being able to get hold of me at any time - I really hated that idea.
The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.