Quotes About Regret

there was no shorthand for I'm sorry. You were obliged to speak those two words.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," I repeated. "But never as much as I have been sinned against!

The "what-ifs": they'll do a number on you.

Once I asked Ma who'd taken the picture, but she couldn't remember. Maybe Ma's death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma's young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.

What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

What had happened was going to be always on me, in me, as permanent as one of Roberta's tattoos. "Dolores," I said. I repeated my name over and over until it sounded warped and unreal. I was never going to be myself again.

What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if? ...

I kept changing the station, over and over around the dial, but all I got were those two channels, or snow. I had spent half my life watching TV. I thought again about the paperweight. I'd had it less than a week when I shook too hard and accidentally sent it flying across my bedroom where it hit the floor and cracked. Leaked, became useless. At the time, it was my biggest tragedy—breaking that paperweight.

People waste their happiness—that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

She shooed away the kiss, a distraction. "Grouchie Gertie," she said, softly. "I'd forgotten that.

But he'd become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

He suggested a closed casket, smiling an odd smile—fixed and dim-witted, like a porpoise's. If I had just agreed to go to college, I thought, then she'd be alive. Things would be normal. "You're normal!" she'd said. Maybe in death she finally knew: I killed babies, mothers. I deserved this pain, was owed my misery.

Oh captain my captain

Of all sad words, of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' Let's add this thought, unto this verse: 'It might have been a great deal worse.

I am given up by traitors; I talk wildly . . . . I have lost my wits . . . . I and nobody else am the greatest traitor, I went myself first to the headland . . . . my own hands carried me there.

Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes, Under this stone one loved too wildly lies; How false she was, no granite could declare; Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

CUT TO: ERNIE, another prisoner, sitting on john, pants down.

Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.

read it." But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though I didn't know it, was hit

of months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-limits. "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that," he said. "But I don't have any

It's one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very sensitive, and I hurt their feelings. I shouldn't have. They had done so much to make sure I could go there, but I just didn't want them around. I didn't want anyone to know I had parents.

sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married

One day in the fall of 2010 he was wistfully going through a box of old snapshots with me, and paused over one that showed him visiting Lisa when she was young. "I probably didn't go over there enough," he said. Since he had not spoken to her all that year, I asked if he might want to reach out to her with a call or email. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then went back to riffling through other old photographs.