Quotes About Regret

Are you going away with no word of farewell? Will there be not a trace left behind? Well I could have loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind. You know that was the last thing on my mind.

Cousin Mike, the person most people believe put Richard on the path he traveled, died of a massive heart attack in April of 1995. He was overweight and still haunted by the ghosts of things he'd done in Vietnam, regularly using heroin. The Army gave Mike a hero's burial with a twenty-one-gun salute.

He who hesitates is lost, my friend.

Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. – Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and motivational speaker

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

Sometimes we come to gratitude too late. It's only after blessing has passed on that we realize what we had.

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

Do you have a mother?" "Naturally I used to have one," I said. "A father, too, if memory serves. Only somewhere along the way I seem to have lost them both. Careless of me.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!

It never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity.

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, Spreads slowly through them — — Philip Larkin, from "Faith Healing," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from "Reference Back," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.

The path not taken, was not taken. No point wondering.

What a wicked game to play To make me feel this way What a wicked thing to do To let me dream of you What a wicked thing to say That you've never felt this way What a wicked thing to do To let me dream of you

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.

Everything was ruined! Pennyroyal didn't just know what she'd done, he'd written a book about it! There were paintings! Even if Pennyroyal had twisted the facts, the truth was still there, in black and white on the pages of his book. Hester Shaw had sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen. And when Tom found out …

How should I remember the child's name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics.

Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought, With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.

I never thought it would end like this. I never thought he would leave me without saying goodbye.