Quotes About Regret

I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers.

How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her

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You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.

Tell him I think writing is lousy, Bill said. Go on, tell him. Tell him I'm ashamed of being a writer.

This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

It was not her fault that when he went to her he was already over

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.

But I won't keep a count of people I have killed as though it were a trophy record or a disgusting business like notches in a gun, he told himself. I have a right to not keep count and I have a right to forget them. No, himself said. You have no right to forget anything. You have no right to shut your eyes to any of it nor any right to forget any of it nor to soften it nor to change it.

We're no kin," Thomas Hudson said. "We just used to live in the same town and make some of the same mistakes.

That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality.

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.

You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more? 'You think too much, old man' he said aloud.

There is no such word as love. Just as there is no word for sorry.

Damn my fish,' the boy said and he started to cry again.

Drink it down, baby, and look forward to being sick.

Oh, go to hell. He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d' Å"uvres. Sit down, I said. Don't be a fool. You've got to take that back. Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff. Take it back. Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashley. How's that? No. Not that. About me going to hell. Oh, don't go to hell, I said. Stick around. We're just starting lunch.

I wish I had the boy.

I do feel better, Thomas Hudson thought. That is the funny part. You always feel better and you always get over your remorse. There's only one thing you don't get over and that is death.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more

I went out the door and suddenly I felt lonely and empty. I had treated seeing Catherine very lightly, I had gotten somewhat drunk and had nearly forgotten to come but when I could not see her there I was feeling lonely and hollow.

He thought a little about the company that he would like to have. No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone.

I can write a short story in six words. For sale: baby shoes, never used