Quotes About Regret

They say he missed that whore.

The woman, Dillard whispered. The woman. They say he missed that whore.

I don't guess I've watched you punish yourself for thirty years to be totally wrong about you.

Jake looked a little more sorrowful as he picked his teeth. Kilt a dentist, he said. A pure accident, but I kilt him.... Well, I've always considered dentistry a dangerous profession, Augustus said. Making a living by yanking people's teeth out is asking for trouble.

Augustus remembered his own love for Clara Allen—it had pained him and pleased him at once.

It was a great annoyance to Billy that because of a long shit and a short nap he had lost his horse. But that was the truth of it and there was nothing he could do but limp along.

There was a period when he wanted to go back, when it would have been nice to sit with Maggie a few minutes and watch her fiddle with her hair. But he chose the river, and his solitude, thinking that in time the feeling would pass, and best so: he would stop thinking about Maggie, she would stop thinking about him... But it didn't pass--all that passed were years.

The thought cross his mind that he ought to have married her and not gone rambling. If he had, he wouldn't be in such a fix. But he felt little fear; just an overpowering fatigue. Life had slipped out of line. It was unfair, it was too bad, but he couldn't find the energy to fight it any longer.

Un año desperdiciado es un año perdido para siempre que nunca se recupera.

What is it that keeps us in motion? Not seldom, the fear that the bitterness of the past will catch up with us. The bitterness over all missed opportunities. Bitterness at being who you are, and still not more like yourself.

That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet.

It's a terrible thing to know everything about someone long after you want to.

Be careful what you give up.

I'll have my first still moment to think about myself. To think about what I've lost, what I'll never have back. To think only of myself. And of Owen, of what I've lost- what I'm still losing- without him.

Then he stands up and starts to head out, the way he came. And it's then that he says the one thing that only he would say to me. "The could-have-been boys still love you," Owen says. He isn't looking at me when he says it, his voice low. The way you say hello. The way you say goodbye.

I'd remember Matt, and I'd remember him wrong. And that was probably when I'd miss him most.

In the dream he was taking off his wedding ring. Look, Hannah, he said. Now you've lost me too.

If this sadness is something she has passed on, she wants to take it back, take all of it back and bear the burden herself. Make different choices, be braver, do just about anything so her daughter thinks she is worthy of getting everything that she needs as opposed to trying to figure out how to be better at giving it away.

He'd called them the could-have-been boys. He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.

Siento que dejé pasar el amor. Que no lo cuidé. No lo podé. No le quité las hojas muertas. Lo vi nacer, crecer y dar un bello fruto que no tuve la precaución de cuidar para que se reprodujera para siempre. No, lo dejé caer en la tierra y permití que se pudriera.

You don't want to hear about the time I was a naughty little boy.

We crossed the James River and in 20 minutes we reached the top of the bluffs on the other side. We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist's hand or a poet's brain or for even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I wold have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.

did hope that somehow Mary could go. "Oh, bother! I've miscounted

He felt her draw a little shuddering breath, and then a wet tumble of water on her cheek. She whispered, "God forgive, Jervaulx—that I sh'dovethee." That I should love thee. It broke the spell that held him. Had she said that? He pushed back, gazing at her.