Quotes About Regret

I think ... that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.

The past, for everyone, is full of missed chances, surviving to understand them, if not set them straight, is one of the things that makes the next breath worth taking.

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

She could have made different choices, but all that mattered were the ones she'd made.

I was going to click my heels and go home, where life would be, as it is anywhere, a little bit dull Knasas, a little bit great and terrible Oz. I just wanted to stand here for a minute, first, and fix in my memory the life I wasn't choosing, the way Rajiv looked at me before I told him I was leaving, the cottonwood snow. Nathan watched me, an uncertain look on his perfectly, terribly familiar face. "Are you ready?" he said

Live the life you choose and enjoy the happiness and regret that comes with that life. ~Yong-Kum

Look, Chuck, I haven't always been a fat old man. I sowed my wild oats, but there were some girls, after they got what they wanted, who were ashamed of what they did and wanted to forget that they couldn't wait to get their hands on my plow. You know what I mean? They'd say some crazy things.

Regret is my compass. I am an alchemist, trained in the transmutation of my nervous system. I have installed trained guides beside me. I am saving at least one life." "I keep writing. I must. Over and over and over. The same story a million ways.

Is it too late?" I asked Margot Cherry that afternoon. It's been more than thirty years and still I can remember how my voice shook. "How do we know when we've loved someone all that we can?

Sunja was still thinking about Hansu and how he might be nearby. More than anything, she was afraid of running into him. Yet it would be worse, she thought, never to see him at all." Book 1, p89

That's what everybody tells me. "I would've had a great comic-book collection, but my mother made me throw them away." But when I was growing up, my mother didn't care. As long as I was reading, she didn't care if my room was filled with comics. I could have saved everything. I was just too stupid to do it.

Sorry about the squishy in your shoe. Must've been something I ate.

With what tragic pathos do all men regard The child grown old whose heart cries!

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.

For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty. Now I am pretty lonely.

For Beatrice, our love broke my heart, and stopped yours.

But sometimes it takes only a photograph and a sentence to make an author cry himself to sleep even years after the photograph was taken.

Sometimes, even the best of plans will occur to you when it is too late.

For Beatrice- I would much prefer it if you were alive and well.

Remember what you learned, years ago: You're never sorry you brought a book.

When you apologize, it is a bit like reaching the last page of a book. The book is still there, with your wicked deed inside, but at least it is closed and put on a shelf. Every single thing I ought to have apologized for, and didn't, is like a book lying open and unfinished.

If Uncle Monty had known known what bad luck was soon to come, he wouldn't have wasted a moment thinking about Gustav. I wish - and I'm sure you wish as well - we could go back in time and warn him, but we can't, and that's that.

Mr. Poe couldn't think of anything else to say that might have comforted the Baudelaire orphans, but I wish now that I had the power to go back in time and speak to these three sobbing children.