I grew up knowing I could have had a million different lives. It makes your life mysterious and your imagination go wild.

As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life. Isn't that interesting? As if I had more than one.

I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole — and yet — and yet — it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life!

The ways in which your current situation — though perhaps unplanned or unwanted — could be the path to the place you’ve actually always wanted to be, if only you’d begin to think of it that way.

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.

Thoughts like "That could've been the case, that could've happened, I could've had that kind of a relationship" also cross my mind.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

Don’t be fixated on following one particular path. For, if it doesn’t work out, you could be very disappointed. Instead, look around and keep looking. There are many paths one can follow. One may not work out, but the other might. Always remember, when opportunity knocks, don’t knock opportunity! Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

If you want to find a better path, you have to be willing to explore a different path.

That sounds simple, but how often do you try something different?

I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.

I climb up, go down again, then climb up once more; between all my studies, as a relaxation I explore every footpath, always curious to see something new.

My thoughts were full of other things When I wandered off the path.

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, 'What would have happened if...' and substituting one chance occurrence for another, , observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy even that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a 'thus' and an 'otherwise', with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.