... I've Been Thinking

... I've been thinking. Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. Twenty-eight years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than ten months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder... you ask yourself... what the sum total of your life represents... what difference your being there at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference at all really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking is very healthy... but I must admit I've had some thoughts along those lines... from time to time.

-Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on The River Kwai - said this on the evening the bridge got completed.
(A must watch movie, for more reasons than one)

Other personal quotes from the actor, Alec Guinness, who very finely played the role of a military martinet in the movie.

"Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn't need one."

"We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, False or true, are expected from the descendants of Empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who, in our eyes, just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologise for being male, white, and European."

In 1985 he told the Guardian newspaper that he hoped by the end of his life to have put everything in order -- "a kind of little bow, tied on life. And I can see myself drifting off into eternity, or nothing, or whatever it may be, with all sorts of bits of loose string hanging out of my pocket. Why didn't I say this or do that, or why didn't I reconcile myself with someone? Or make sure that someone whom I like was all right in every way, either financially or, I don't know..."

Alec Guinness once sent a script back with a polite rejection. The writer came back with a "we tailored it just for you." He simply replied: "But no one came to take measurements."

"I gave my best performances during the war - trying to be an officer and a gentleman."

"Getting to the theatre on the early side, usually about seven o'clock, changing into a dressing-gown, applying make-up, having a chat for a few minutes with other actors and then, quite unconsciously, beginning to assume another personality which would stay with me (but mostly tucked inside) until curtain down, was all I required of life. I thought it bliss."

"An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents."

"Personally, I have only one great regret - that I never *dared* enough. If at all."

Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000027/bio