Quotes About Regret

Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all

It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of 'what ifs'. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes where you made different decisions.

Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other...caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.

One life of sadness was enough. What is the point of risking more?

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

Can I ask you something?" asks Will, after a while. The man sips his whisky instead of answering. Will asks the question anyway. "Have you ever been in love?" The man places his glass down and stares at Will, steel-eyed. The expected reaction, "Once," he responds , the word just a croak from the back of his throat. Will nods. "It's always just once, isn't it? The rest..they're just echoes

The hardest bit about losing people you loved wasn`t thinking about the memories you had, the ones that had already been made. No. The hardest bit was the stuff that should have been, but had now been denied.

It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become. And there really were quite a lot of things she hadn't become.

The next day I had a hangover. I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Every move had been a mistake, every decision a disaster, every day a retreat from who she'd imagined she'd be.

Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

Memories were just future sadness stored away

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

It was making me think about human life in a way I didn't want to think about it. Human life, I realized, got progressively worse as you got older, by the sound of things.

I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.

The Many Lives of Nora Seed