Quotes About Regret

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: we take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

What could you give me, I ask, my voice shaking, to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

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

As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

People in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away ? I look away from her. It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.

There are some things, I think, you're btter off not remembering.

It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I had filed for divorce, but that wasn't what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?

How could I not have seen this coming, when I looked into your eyes and vowed to be with you forever?

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.

Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn't.

She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. "You haven't seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I'm not the great love of his life, the one he'll never forget." "You are to me," I say.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?

For the first time in my life I begin to understand how a parent my 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 feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.

I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct - there was an ingredient in my baking more concenctrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.

This was the first time I had not just rushed in and followed my instincts, and it wasn't working out. I was beginning to actively regret it.

What you don't sweat out when you're young will turn into tears when you're old.

Not many people are really that meticulous with what they do, I suppose, but I'm just a control freak and terribly afraid of failure or regret. I work very hard on these things.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work.

It would be sad if my best work had been 20 years ago and now I only had memories.