Quotes About Regret

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

Je suis désolé ,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn't marry him, she thought.

That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.

Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.

Long lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will but they won't.' -Sylvie

Gloria regretted that she wasn't a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die.

A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.

I dreamt of going on the stage once, he said, looking crestfallen. It's never too late, I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.

Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...

Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-

He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated).

Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.

Takes a man or a woman to say I'm sorry, and it takes a fool to walk away.

Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that place- not often.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Remorse of conscience is like an old wound; a man is in no condition to fight under such circumstances. The pain abates his vigor and takes up too much of his attention.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

foolish men say things in anger that they later regret and an angry tongue does not mean one is guilty.

Every crime will bring remorse to the man who committed it

Man, wretched man, whene'er he stoops to sin, Feels, with the act, a strong remorse within.

That deed is not well done of which a man must repent, and the reward of which he receives crying and with a tearful face.

One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence.