Quotes About Regret

If it had been me, I would have done the same thing, remained silent, then died.

You were not cut out for a quiet life because you are honest to a fault. A man can want something to the point of indecency, he said, and when he attains his goal, it is ashes in his mouth and a bad conscience. The twentieth century did not look to be an age with any patience for the past.

And you, fallen Wendy, eviscerated by the eternal recurrence of it all, hear Peter snarl at you for growing guilty and big and old...

She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

Thank you, she says, following the ancient formula. For all these gifts that you have given. And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.

When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.

Chester's death had almost killed him. All the grief over Alyssa that he'd suppressed in order to protect me tore out of him when the crippled old beast gave up.

She might live with anything except being forgiven.

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he'd do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago." "Yep. And you always said the next best time was now." "Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.

the sadness of completion.

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.

Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you? Sully: Not often. Now and then.

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht—" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up.

Non basta una vita One life isn't enough

You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.