Quotes About Regret

He says, "I saved her only to hear her die.

What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?

Here's Coleridge, in 1804, when he turned thirty-two: 'Yesterday was my Birth Day. So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. - O Sorrow and Shame...I have done nothing!

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

Frederick said we don't have choices, don't own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet—I will not— Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.

I saved her only to hear her die.

If only she had brought her novel down with her.

his heart laced with regret.

Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

What a fool I was. What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it...or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become....How much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.

Shrouded in his oxhide cape with snow on his shoulders he looks like a phantom from a woodcutter's song, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her husband on thrones in a garden of bliss, where milk pours from stones and honey runs in streams and winter never comes, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.

she's hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.

every second is a second lost.

Go," says Volkheimer again. Werner looks at him a last time: his torn jacket and shovel jaw. The tenderness of his big hands. What you could be.

He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.

And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions.

every timidity eventually turns into regret.

He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

There are no more gates within him, no more divisions. It is as if everything he has done in his life has pooled together inside him and slops dully against his edges. His mother, the man he has killed, the languishing garden--he will never be able to live it down, never live through it, never live enough to compensate for all the things he has stolen.

He was about twenty-six when he died

This was a disastrous error in judgment, as Brutus and his friends now realized.