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Quotes About Remorse

And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.
~ Orson Scott Card
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
~ Orson Scott Card
He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.
~ Orson Scott Card
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
~ Oscar Wilde
Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
~ Cormac McCarthy
I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He'd killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it.
~ Cormac McCarthy
Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You may see the time you wish you had worse.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You believe that the loss of those you loved has absolved you of all else.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You've wore Rawlins completely out. I reckon you know that. You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised, said Blevins. Where the hell'd you hear that at? I dont know. I just decided to say it.
~ Cormac McCarthy
Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
~ Cormac McCarthy
Sollte er Staubfinger vielleicht doch noch etwas schlechter machen? Nein, er hatte ihn schon umgebracht, heute würde er ihm einen Gefallen tun. Heute würde er seine Frau dazu bringen, ihm ein für alle Mal zu verzeihen, dass er zehn Jahre fort gewesen war. Manchmal kann ich doch wahrlich ein netter Mensch sein!, dachte Fenoglio.
~ Cornelia Funke
most of what I hated about present-day America was stuff I helped to invent.
~ Cory Doctorow
I don't know what she told you, but I never was sorry I'd married her or loved her because of you. You always made a difference, made a real difference, from the very beginning. I always knew that, inside me, but I didn't bother to learn how to show you. I'm sorry, Jeff, I should have taken the trouble.
~ Cynthia Voigt
Because what good's confession without penance—right
~ Wally Lamb
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.
~ Wally Lamb
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.
~ Walt Whitman
Age has no pleasures, wrinkles have no influence, revenge itself dies away in impotent curses. Then comes remorse, with all its vipers, mixed with vain regrets for the past, and despair for the future!—Then, when all other strong impulses have ceased, we become like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never repentance.—But thy
~ Walter Scott
I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted.
~ WC Fields
But I've never spoken to a grave before. I don't know what to say. I don't know how. 'I'm so sorry,' I choke out, but that's as far as I get before I start crying. I feel bad that she's gone. I feel overwhelmed. And I feel guilt. Guilt that I've recovered. Guilt that I'm happy. Guilt that I ever thought she was the lucky one.
~ Wendelin Van Draanen
If he wanted to drink himself to death it was nobody's affair but his own; his life was his life to throw away, if that's what he wanted; but—was that what he wanted? If so, why did he suffer remorse? Obviously there was the will in him to destroy himself; part of him was bent on self-destruction—he'd be the last to deny it. But obviously, too, part was not; part held back and expressed its disapproval in remorse and shame.
~ Charles Jackson
Guilt is the uncomfortable or painful feeling that results from doing something that violates or breaks a personal standard or value, or from hurting another person, or even from breaking an agreement or a law. Guilt thus concerns our behavior, feeling bad about what we have done, or about what we didn't do that we were supposed to have done.
~ Charles L. Whitfield
What can't be forgiven?'" I nodded. "It's words. Words you can't take back
~ Charles Martin
You can't tell a dead man you're sorry.
~ Charles Martin