Quotes About Regret

Nick's need to reduce dissonance was increased by the irrevocability of his decision; he could not unmake that decision without losing a lot of money.

My first marriage was totally unsuitable and shouldn't have happened. It was a whirlwind, rebound thing. I was 23 or 24 - a baby.

Life is too short to spend your time pining for someone who isn't here.

I hope he loves you as I should have.

There's already someone that I love very much. I just never knew quite how much until it was too late.

It's funny how things don't matter any more when it's too late.

And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market—the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage . . . —JOHN UPDIKE, "Perfection Wasted

You never stop thinking you might have beaten it somehow, and there were moments when we thought we had. Your husband can be dead years, and you can't stop thinking how you might have beaten it. Or how they could have left ten minutes earlier, or the next morning. Or that damn lighthouse could have flickered through the fog.

I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it. Jean-Paul Sartre, Words

She supposed that there were some things, some lost things, some things that could never be recovered, that would always be regretted; mourned; grieved over.

The only evil is that I don't mind that it happened.

I stay in that state of mind for the next couple of days, in the places that only exist in the past. The things you can't undo get lodged in the darkest corners of your mind, where nothing ever seems to get solved, just recycled into new anxiety.

I realize with regret that my report is not as complete as it should be," she wrote, "and had fully intended to do better, but we are told that good intentions make excellent paving stones.

If we were teenagers, I could kiss you. But I'm on a platform behind a counter wearing a name tag and we're too old to be young.

She wasted my heart, my time.

There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.

The real horror of my life is not that I've killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I've loved didn't love me back.

I peeked in the bag. Do you know what was in there? I'll tell you what was in there: a collapsible tray table. Is there any sadder purchase in this fucking world? Maybe a CD of C+C Music Factory's Greatest Hits, but that's about it.

She thinks she's so smart but if you erase an hour, it doesn't mean shit, not unless you erase the weeks leading up to that hour.

I go over the mistake in my head a dozen times a day. How I was hiding in a closet upstairs at the Salinger house. How I had to pee but couldn't leave. So I pissed in a mug—a ceramic mug—and I put the mug down on the hardwood floor of the closet. I ran when I had the chance, and there is no way around it: I forgot the mug.

Most people die old, full of pain and regret. Or young and full of drugs and self-indulgence—or sheer bad luck.

I scroll through my own stories in my phone, the ones I write when I can't sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination.

You did all those awful things, but you also fell in love with a person who can forgive you.

know it's hard, being with the wrong person when the right person is right here.