Quotes About Regret

looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful.

If I could meet you again, at a different time under different circumstances, I could let myself worship you the way you deserve.

If I could meet you again, at a different time under different circumstances, I could let myself worship you the way you deserve. But I can't now.

The damage in many cases was lifelong. These women had not just surrendered a child. They had surrendered control over the most important decision they might ever make to people who they felt did not necessarily have their best interest at heart. The shame was no longer about being single and pregnant. The shame was that they had given away, or not fought hard enough to keep, their child.

ex-boyfriend.

Later that night, I tore up the list of mean things to do to Aunt Cecelia.

Mm-hm," Dawn said. "Um, I'm sorry." "Yeah. Right." I'm sorry, too, Mary Anne was what I was sort of hoping to hear.

I wished my dad had seen it.

Hmmph. This was a sorry excuse for a baby-sitting club.

Let's say your life has gone off track. You used to be very motivated, inspired by your opportunities, and physically fit, but now you are lazy, easily discouraged, and overweight. How did you get this way? You might be able to tell a story about how your life unraveled, but you cannot truly account for why you let it happen.

why it is worse to lose something than not to gain it.

You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

Now? Why now? Why am I missing her now, Frankie? Why not then? When she was there? Why am I afraid that I'm gonna' lose her when she's already gone. And this fear--this fear swarms through me--floods my whole body 'til there's nothing left. Nothing left of me. And then it turns--it turns to a fear for my whole life. Like my whole life is lost from losing her. Gone. That I'll die like this. Lost. Just lost.

stewing about something in the past you can't do anything about anyway.

I miss how things were familiar with him, even if it was the familiar feeling of being let down.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

MARRY IN HASTE, REPENT AT LEISURE.

What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.

Converse with almost any man, grown old in a profession, and you will find him regretting that he did not enter into some different course, to which he too late finds his genius better adapted, or in which he discovers that wealth and honour are more easily attained.

When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with disorders of the mind very near to madness.

Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.

This was the bottomless panic at the lost smooth cheek of childhood, at no longer being young.

Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.

And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow!