Quotes About Regret

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.

I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather's wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother's question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.

It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonders, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green.

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story.

As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.

The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes.

The African patted the horse's neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant's back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality

You hit me with a tuba," he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry." A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my

From the beginning, she had left a hole in my heart that could never quite heal. I could go years without seeing her but I could never stop thinking about her. Thinking about where she was, what she was doing, who she was with.

Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future.

The question of how you can hope and expect someone to forgive you when deep down you don't forgive yourself.

When you have more to look back at than forward to, you start thinking about the things you've done.

I told him through the door that he could take his job and shove it up his ass. 'Course, a week later I had to ask him to pull it out of his ass and give it back to me.

There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

Little Peter's," Soto said.

would have happened if she were here tonight when