Quotes About Regret

Today I know what I felt, but then I didn't understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.

But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.

Para qué habrán servido entonces todas estas páginas. Me proponía aferrarla, tenerla otra vez a mi lado, y me moriré sin saber si lo he conseguido.

In a short while I wished I could talk every day to a boy on that level: how many mistakes I had made with him; what foolishness it had been to want him, love him, and yet always avoid him.

It's relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner. I had a friend of my age with her own house, full of opulent, orderly things. That

Il ne m'aurait jamais fait de mal, il n'était capable que de s'en faire à lui-même.

to be healthy, and desperate to be a Natasha at the ball with Prince Andrei or Kuryagin, and instead to be sitting alone, staring at the ceiling, while listening to the echo of the music, the sound of voices, the laughter.

Ahora la aterraba y la hacía sufrir la gruesa alianza que le brillaba en el anular. Incrédula, hizo un repaso de aquel día: la iglesia, el oficio religioso, la fiesta. Qué he hecho, pensó aturdida por el vino, qué es esta argolla de oro, este cero brillante dentro del que he metido el dedo.

erased my Enzo, she said, the person I was most fond of. Your father erases everything

She felt that the years she had dedicated to him had been in vain

Por eso, por favor, si te ofendo, si te digo cosas feas, tú tápate los oídos, no quiero hacerlo y pese a todo lo hago. Por favor, por favor, ahora no me dejes, que, si no, me vengo abajo.

But in a confused way I felt that if I ran away with the others I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.

2007), and The Lost Daughter

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence.

A male, apart from the mad moments when you love him and he enters you, always remains outside. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. He liked me, I liked him, the end.

Recordaba un tono despreciativo que yo había adoptado, ciertos fragmentos de la charla con la que había tratado de impresionar, y me entraba una sensación de frío y náuseas, quería echarme de mí misma, como si fuera a vomitarme.

Quisiera no tener memoria o convertirme en el piadoso polvo para escapar a la condena de mirarme.

When we grow old, there can only be one regret — not to have given enough of ourselves.

Vice is basically the love of failure.

For this I weep all my days and throughout my lifetime grieve that I swam from my own lands and came from familiar lands towards these strange doors to these foreign gates.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What's the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana's aunt's apartment. Elle pleure. Il pleure. Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

I had a slab of German chocolate cake the size of a child's tombstone. Ralph

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

I was overcome by a sense of how much more there was in his life than in mine, by the things to do and distances to travel, while I never had done anything or gone anywhere, and never would.