Abigail McCarthy Quotes

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

The wealthiest place on the planet is the graveyard, because in the graveyard we will find inventions that we were never ever exposed to, ideas, dreams that never became a reality, hopes and aspirations that were never acted upon.

Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.

The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

I believe that a dream un-followed turns into all kinds of bad things in the lives of those who don't pursue them.

We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential.

One of the worst things you can die with is potential.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter of its wings, and feel it near, And just within our reach? It was. And yet We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret; But still our place is kept, and it will wait, Ready for us to fill it, soon or late. No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been.

She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become.

Your biggest failure is the thing you dreamed of contributing but didn't find the guts to do.

Hope and wishes for all that delights will sour in the midst of action not taken and words unsaid.

An emotion that lives with me is a sense of 'what might have been' had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.

Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it - but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.

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

I'm the first to admit that I never achieved my potential as an actress.

I had lived a charmed life, and then I lost a beautiful woman I loved with all my heart.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't.

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

For a lot of different reasons I didn't fulfil my potential.

I missed my youth because I was dancing, I didn't do all the crazy stuff. I didn't have boyfriends or anything - the first man I met I married!

Always, I seemed to just miss out. Why, I wasn't even the most valuable senior athlete in my high school in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.