Quotes About Regret

I ain't never done nothin' that wasn't part sin.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

I can tell all I want about them now because they are all dead and they won't resent the truth about themselves.

Ever see a cock pheasant, stiff and beautiful, ever' feather drawed an' painted an' even his eyes drawed in pretty? An' bang! You pick him up - bloody an' twisted, an' you spoiled somepin better'n you; an' eatin' him don't ever make it up to you, 'cause you spoiled somepin in yaself, an' you can't never fix it up.

It ain't only the keepin' her out. I kep' her out to get drunk. I knowed they was gonna come a time when I got to get drunk, when I'd get to hurtin' inside so I got to get drunk. Figgered time wasn' yet, an' then—the preacher went an' give 'imself up to save Tom.

I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple.

All of these years I've cheated Liza. I've given her an untruth, a counterfeit, and I've saved the best for those dark sweet hours. And now I could wish that she may have had some secret caller too. But I'll never know that. I think she would maybe have bolted her heart shut and thrown the key to hell.

Sad as they were at his moral decay, the friends were not a little jealous of the good time Danny was having.

And here he was, a big, fat, grown-up whoremaster, leaning his stomach against his desk while his cheeks darkened with blood and excited chills ran up his legs and thighs.

A frightened sorrow has closed down over my heart. I wish I were a child so I could cry. I'm too old to be afraid like this. And I've not felt such despair since a bird died in my hand by a flowing water long ago

It was the same noble impulse that stripped the forests of the West and right now is pumping water out of California's earth faster than it can rain back in. When the desert comes, people will be sad;

I ain't never done nothin' that wasn't part sin, said John, and he looked at the long wrapped body. p. 241

And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.

One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.

Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker's face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.

We love too late... Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or give back speech truly?

What's this about you being married?" "Well, I was. Still am." He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It's like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.

He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.

She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled

Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.

Sweetie, the bluebird has flown. We're too young to sit around the rest of our lives waiting for it to fly back in the window. It won't. It can't fly backwards.' He was using his hands again in that disagreeable stagey way, and Ruth was angered by the flicker of conceit in his expression when he struck upon the image of the bluebird fying backwards - a piece of animation on the screen of his face.

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

Then, if to make your ruin more, You'll peevishly be coy, Die with the scandal of a whore And never know the joy.