Quotes About Regret

Männer, die die Stadt für immer verlassen hatten, erinnerten sich manchmal an einem grauen, naßkalten Abend in London des rosigen Schimmers und der glühenden Pracht, die, kaum gesehen, auch schon wieder verblichen; sie fragten sich dann, warum sie die Küste so gehaßt hatten, und solange sie einen Tropfen im Glase hatten, sehnten sie sich danach, dorthin zurückzukehren.

Failures like ours are often just failures of hope. Please – cannot you say you are sorry you did not have more hope?

My second wife – I was still young then – she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that.

She had so much more capacity for love than I had. I couldn't bring that curtain round the moment, I couldn't forget and I couldn't not fear.

he recognized the malice which remained alive and kicking in the old man long after discretion had died from a lifetime's neglect.

All the same you needed to be a little drunk to die.

Im Leben der meisten Menschen gibt es einen Augenblick, in dem man nicht mehr zurück kann.

She dabbed at her eyes. 'You'd be bored, Henry. An unfinished bottle of champagne found in an old cupboard with all the sparkle gone …' The jaded phrase was worthy of a Haymarket author.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moments of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

HE SAID TO Beatrice, 'I was just leaning forward to switch on the engine. That saved me, I imagine. Of course it was his right to fire back. It was a real duel, but the third shot was mine.' 'What happened afterwards?' 'I had time to drive away before I was sick.' 'Sick?' 'I suppose if I hadn't missed the war it would have seemed much less serious a thing killing a man. Poor Carter.' 'Why should you

I told her that I'd done things in my youth that had placed me beyond the comfort and shelter of love, and so i had conducted my life in retreat.

But I'm looking at life from the opposite end of the telescope from you, and everything that once seemed so grand and impressive has all shrunk down to size. I can see now what could have been, but wasn't, and I don't want you to get to my age and feel the same way.

Too often we look back on our lives and wish we could have our time again. To do better, to do more, to walk the paths not taken. But I have loved and I have learned. I have done my best to pass on my experiences to others. And in that I have no regrets.

His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.

Could she have done what she'd done today if she'd had a mother to go to? Could she have had the life she didn't yet know she was going to have? Could her mother have known, making her dreadful choice, how she had blessed her?

All that I was, but for reflections in a cracked mirror, has been lost for a long, long time.

Then, WHAM! We're called up. We cross the vac. We drop. It gets real. All the shit happens at once, in a bloody, grinding flash—and if you live through it, if you survive with enough soul left to even care, you spend the rest of your fucked-up life wondering whether you should have done it different, done it better, or not at all. All for glory and the Corps.

Wasting time with the wrong person is just time wasted.

wasting time with the wrong person is just time wasted. And when you do move on and find your right person, believe me, you're not going to wish you had gotten to spend more time with Stinky the Time-Waster or Freddy Can't-Remember-to-Call.

Axonn sighed. Just like the good old days, he said. Now I remember why I hated them so much.

If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.