Quotes About Regret

There was a quote he could not quite remember, something about the past being an island surrounded by time. He had missed the last boat to the island.

With a jolt of surprise, he realized he had not really wanted anything for twenty years.

Leitor ignaro, se não guardas as cartas da juventude, não conhecerás um dia a filosofia das folhas velhas, não gostarás o prazer de ver-te, ao longe, na penumbra, com um chapéu de três bicos, botas de sete léguas e longas barbas assírias, a bailar ao som de uma gaita anacreôntica. Guarda as tuas cartas da juventude!

You know how hind-sight is 20/20? Love is when you look back and wouldn't change anything.

Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?

As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.

Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you'd let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I've been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

It does'nt matter who forgives you, if you're the one who can't forget.

if i'm going to fuck up my life, does it really matter which way i do it?.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.

What you had could never make up for what you'd lost.

You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud.

I wonder if the conversations you've never had with someone count, if you've been over them a thousand times in your mind.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.

How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else...

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

Betrayal was a stone beneath a mattress of thr bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

We all have things that come back to haunt us. Some of us just see them more clearly than others.