Quotes About Regret

It was like - It was like Special Olympics or something.

You think you may not be ready, that you'll do it at a more convenient time. But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you're willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.

I don't think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.

The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person. I

On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.

I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though

It's hard, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don't mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer

Of course, I didn't say all that. Maybe I should have.

At the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent.

At the end of your life, you will never regret winning one more verdict or earning one more paycheck. You WILL regret time not spent with a spouse, a friend or a loved one.

AT the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, not wining one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent.

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

People like to dig up the bodies, anguish over mistakes. What's the point? The water's poisoned. There's no cleaning it up after it's done. The only thing you can do is walk away—and set fire to your bridges.

She wanted to go back, to clean it all up, to rewrite her story without all the dark parts, to unknow the things she knew, to unsee the things she'd seen, to live without her memories, her shame, her regret. And maybe that was a kind of atonement, after all. But none of those things were possible.

Only a fool wants to go back to the land of childhood . . . Or perhaps it is the longing for the certainties of childhood that makes a man a fool.

But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.

We were not made for this killing thing, I swear. Back up. Big mistake.

A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.

It wasn't all a waste," she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn't exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.