logo

Quotes About Regret

But I didn't. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn't- I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.
~ Donna Tartt
It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
~ Donna Tartt
Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.
~ Donna Tartt
I felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I'd been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I'd stood on the corner to savor it - the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.
~ Donna Tartt
Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
~ Donna Tartt
Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les aubes sont navrantes.
~ Donna Tartt
Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.
~ Donna Tartt
Things would have turned out better is she had lived. As it was, she died when I was kid;and thought everything that happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.
~ Donna Tartt
It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne--but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they'd bought it for.
~ Donna Tartt
Forgive me for for all the things that i did, but mostly for all the things i didn't do
~ Donna Tartt
Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again—not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But—" pushing his sleeve back down—"you should never get a person's name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.
~ Donna Tartt
Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick to assure me that it wasn't; and yes, only a kid, who could have known, terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to anyone, it's all perfectly true and I don't believe a word of it.
~ Donna Tartt
only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.
~ Donna Tartt
It was better never to have been born - never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
~ Donna Tartt
I thought she was going to say, because I don't love you, which probably would have been more or less the truth, but instead, to my surprise, she said: Because I love Henry. Henry's dead. I can't help it. I still love him. I loved him, too, I said. For just a moment, I thought I felt her waver. But then she looked away. I know you did, she said. But it's not enough.
~ Donna Tartt
It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.
~ Donna Tartt
Because I love Henry. Henry's dead. I can't help it. I still love him.
~ Donna Tartt
and though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did.
~ Donna Tartt
Forgive me for all the things I did, but mostly for the things I didn't
~ Donna Tartt
as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.
~ Donna Tartt
hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.
~ Donna Tartt
No second chances.
~ Donna Tartt
No one is ever too old to do a foolish thing.
~ Unknown
Sorry to hear about your Dad." He shrugged. "He was seventy, and we always told him fast food would kill him." "Heart attack?" "He was hit by a Pizza Express truck.
~ J.A. Konrath