"The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
— Robert Frost

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future."
— Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)

"There are no safe choices. Only other choices. There are no safe choices

"
— Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty)

"You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"There is a time in every life when paths are chosen, character is forged. I could have chosen a different path. But I didn’t. I failed myself."
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man."
— Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

"When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do."
— Terry Pratchett (Wintersmith)

"There's small choice in rotten apples."
— William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew)

"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice."
— Neil Peart

"You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition"
— Philippa Gregory

"I believe the choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself."
— Oprah Winfrey

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."
— Jeanette Winterson (Lighthousekeeping)

"Lions are born knowing they are predators. Antelopes understand they are the prey.
Humans are one of the few creatures on Earth given the choice."
— Patrick H.T. Doyle

"Destiny is not a matter of change, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."
— William Jennings Bryan

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."
— George Eliot

"Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man. "
— East of Eden

"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin)"
— Maester Aemon

"The way I define happiness is being the creator of your experience, choosing to take pleasure in what you have, right now, regardless of the circumstances, while being the best you that you can be."
— Leo Babauta

"If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise."
— Robert Fritz (The Path of Least Resistance)

"Iwanted to die that second. I felt reached inside me now. how could I have to make a choice now?"
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

""You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path thats clear. I will choose Freewill."
— Neil Peart

""Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns. I am thankful that thorns have roses." "
— Alphonse Karr

"The history of free men is never written by chance but by choice - their choice."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing."
— Laurie Buchanan

"With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of."
— Alex Shakar (The Savage Girl)

"We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
-Orrec-"
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Gifts)

"Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer."
— B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)

"It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by."
— Rumer Godden (The Dolls' House)

"We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.
"
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Everything in this life passes away — only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby find ourselves outside of God; or to choose the way of life, to choose God Who calls us and for Whom our heart is searching."
— Seraphim Rose

"When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be."
— Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, the Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poetry)

"Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?"
— John Heywood

"I was now well prepared to be a career criminal. I had the proper training and a natural feel for the business. I had a respect for the old-liners like Angelo and Don Frederico. I had been a witness to both murder and betrayal and had my appetite whetted for acts of revenge.

I just didn't have the stomach for any of it.

I didn't want my life to be a lonely and sinister on, where even the closest of friends could overnight turn into an enemy who needed to be eliminated. If I went the way Angelo had paved, I would earn millions, but would never be allowed to taste the happiness and enjoyment such wealth often brings. I would rule over a dark world, a place where treachery and deceit would be at my side and never know the simple pleasures of an ordinary life. p368. "
— Lorenzo Carcaterra (Gangster.)

"Though our hourglass runs, one day it shall not, but then our eternity hourglass begins with never ending sands, what mantle do you want to set your hourglass of eternal life upon? This in your choice to make, no one but you can make that decision. So think wisely and live honorable, for your actions will choice the destination of your hourglass."
— Tabitha Robin

"The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we’re going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We’re living life in a more deliberate way. We don’t want to miss a single important event. We don’t want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions."
— James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision)

""One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.""
— Michael Ignatieff