Quotes About Regret

Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He'd been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He'd put a lot of energy into it.

But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.

Sorry solves nothing

This is what I miss… not something that's gone, but something that will never happen.

The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over.

Looking back on his life, he sees himself spread out on the earth like a giant covered in tiny threads that have held him down. Tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns, and fears he took seriously at the time. Debts, timetables, the need for money, the longing for comfort; the earworm of sex, repeating itself over and over like a neural feedback loop. He's been the puppet of his own constricted desires.

Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his long sardonic unrevealing face. I ought to have done that with Luke, paid more attention, to the details, the moles and scares, the singular creases; I didn't and he's fading. Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless.

She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.

You should not be sad, he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later. The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. It is criminal, the love, he said, patting my shoulder. But none is worse.—

I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point.

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's, any more. Instead, I am his. Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened. So Luke: what I want to ask you now, what I need to know is, Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn't afford to lose you.

All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it.

That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.

she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again.

This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here Let's stop there. I intend to get out

Fuck , thinks Stan. She knows about the chickens.

It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.

She had loved him, uselessly.

He had been with me, but he wasn't with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.

He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly.