If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'
I intended to be famous by the time I was 16 and rich by the time I was 20. Curiously, it didn't pan out!
There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.
People saying, 'Life didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.' Welcome to the club. I wanted to be the starting center-fielder for the Boston Red Sox, for chrissakes!
How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition.
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
To anyone who has started out on a long campaign believing that the gold medal was destined for him, the feeling when, all of a sudden, the medal has gone somewhere else is quite indescribable.
It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.
Graveyards are filled with books that were never written, songs that were never sung, words that were never spoken, things that were never done.
And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
I really didn't have aspirations. I was just tall.
I had this total obsession that I would have my first movie at the Empire when I was 24, so it was a big disappointment that it didn't happen.
Dreams have consequences.
Things don't always happen the way one wishes they would.
I peaked early. I was told I'd missed my boat.
I was going to be the next big voice-over thing, of course, in my mind. I didn't.
For the first time in my life, in my mid-20s, I started to question things. Had I been deceived? I thought I had been destined for something great - to be Whitney Houston or Jennifer Holliday or Phylicia Rashad. I started to realize that a lot of people think that, and it doesn't happen for almost everyone.
Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.
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.
It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.
And there have certainly been movies I wanted to be in and milestones I wanted to surpass that did not happen.
I've seen a lot of friends who have a lot of great projects, whether it's a script or a play or whatever, and it is a great project and they have great people involved, and they can't make it.
