“But we can't go back. We can only go forward.”
Variant: One can never go back. One always has to move forward.
Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty
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Libba Bray 254
American teen writer 1964Related quotes

“When you can't go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward.”
Source: The Alchemist

“We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to move forward.”
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_xcaBdBHf4

Interview with Putra Nababan in the White House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38sFgxBhpkU (March 2010)
2010

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)
Variant: If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover these precious values: that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

1940s, Victory broadcast (1945)
Context: We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.
A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

“Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.”
Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 91.
Context: There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

http://www.predsednik.yu/mwc/default.asp?c=101500&g=20060904151245&lng=eng&hs1=1
At the presidential inauguration ceremony.