Quotes About Regret

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

I told you why. If I don't do it now, I never will. I'll just be some office drone ten years from now, wishing I had done something interesting at least once in my life.

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.

You are saying, I would like to but I could never forgive you or myself. I am saying, if you let me kneel before you once, I can live without forgiveness for a very long time.

Only later, when it may be too late, do we realize that in fact we have made things worse.

But then all at once he wanted to have his own goods and money and to be his own master, and so he asked his father to give him his portion, and he left his home and went and wasted all his substance.

There'll be things in your life you'll regret. Dumb mistakes, bad choices. They're like these awful tattoos you can't get rid of. So you wear something over them. Keep them out of sight. That's all I've been doing. Just trying not to look at it.

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed.

Przesz?o?? bije we mnie niczym drugie serce.

I looked out into the luminous grey twilight, aghast and in an obscure way proud at the thought of what I had lost, of what might have been.

Many things lost in life can be restored; however, time misused can never be recovered. Once the sun goes down, the day is forever gone.

I've spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on and now it's out beyond the harbour on the high seas, but it's very nice to look at.

And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it's difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.

Both boys stayed very quiet for a few minutes, neither one wanting to say anything he might regret.

He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.

I think this was a bad idea,' he repeated. 'I think the best thing to do would be to forget all about this and just go back home. We can chalk it up to experience

But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our futures lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.

I stared at him and felt the tears forming in my eyes. "Do you know how much I've missed you?" I asked him. "It's been almost thirty years. I shouldn't have had to spend all that time on my own.

No woman will ever take care of my children but me, she said. I will not allow it, do you understand? And after I am gone Madge Toxley, if you try to make them yours, then you will live to regret it.

But then I didn't know what I was giving up until it was already gone. No one ever does, do they?

This deficiency would be scorched into our future like an ill-considered tattoo.

Why did they abandon me? Why do we abandon each other? Why did I abandon you?