Quotes About Forgiveness

One could not change the past anyway. Why let it blight the present and the future?

Why would forgiveness be of any value if it were reserved only for forgivable offenses?

Life is always like that, he said gently. We are what we are because of what has happened to us in the past. We cannot change that and we should not wish to. I love you as you are, Elizabeth. Perhaps I would not love you as well if you had not met and loved and lost Hetherington. Perhaps the experience has given you the air of maturity and serenity that I so admire in you. Give me your future, my dear. I do not ask for the past.

We diminish ourselves too," she said at last, "when feeling sorry for someone who has done a dreadful wrong leads us to excuse him and simply hope he will mend his ways. Feeling sorry for someone but acknowledging that justice ought nevertheless to be done is more appropriate to moral beings.

And she hated him—perhaps the more so because there was no reason for her hatred. Quite the contrary. She was the one who had wronged him . . . His own dislike was a result of what she had done to him. And she knew now that the way she had justified her behavior all those years ago had been all wrong. There had been no justification.

She did love him. She always had, even when she had hated him most.

Good-bye, Henry, he said. You are young. You will forget this episode soon and be happy again as you were when I met you. I am sorry that I have saddened you, my love.

He had suffered as much as she. She closed her eyes and laid her forehead in one shaking hand. What a revolutionary thought! She had accustomed herself for so long to the idea that he was a heartless wretch. Had he just been her own very dear Robert all the time?

Miss Daisy Morrison, behaving so scandalously on her very first public appearance among the beau monde, would not easily be forgiven. But of course a

It had been a short conversation. It had also been the kindest they had shared in longer than ten years.

Elizabeth had tried to hate him in that first year when the pain had been intense enough to drive her almost out of her mind. But even then she had not been able to. The best she could do eventually was to dull all feeling, so that a mere empty ache would gnaw at her when her mind strayed to that episode in her life. She had trained herself to think of him, if at all, as he was at the beginning of their relationship.

No es fácil mirar el propio pasado, sobre todo cuando uno creía que se habían borrado todas las huellas.

For God's sake if you must hate me, do so wholeheartedly.

A great deal of good had happened. The past had been explained and forgiven. The bitterness of years had been purged. There could be some peace now for two people because he had come home.

I thought I had forgotten . . . But maybe I just pushed it deep and denied it and let it fester.

For Allie would suffer for what she had done this night. And he would be the last person on this earth who could comfort her.

At the present, she said, you are here holding my hands. Your past has nothing to do with me. Just as mine has nothing to do with you.

I thought my punishment was to be eternal," her mother said. "It is the millstone I have carried about my neck for well nigh forty years. I thought I would carry it to my grave.

She had loved him mindlessly, passionately, for the following five years, until he had told her that he was going away and never coming back. And even beyond that she had loved him, painfully and against her will, until she had finally forced herself to forget. Or to tell herself that she had forgotten.

You don't think you will be sorry, Diana? No, she said. Do you think you will be? Only if I see you unhappy, he said. I will never forgive myself if I make you unhappy.

He had not forgiven her and doubted that he ever would or could. And during his own brief visit to her and the meeting at last evening's ball she had shown no sign of wishing forgiveness.

You see now why I cannot marry you? I would never be able to rid myself of the shame of my past. And you would not be able to forget, either.

Get angry, Elizabeth. Curse him. Yell. But don't keep on grieving like this. Please, love.

The memory of his treachery would harden her against her own heart.