Regret Quotes

Life is short, Isobeli. If we gave time to everything sooner or later we'd run out of it. We only have now. And we would be foolish to not seize it while we have it. So, why would it matter if I love him today or five years from now?

Nadège Richards

Let's live to regret this" (Martin Riggs [Mel Gibson] to Lorna Cole [Rene Russo] in Lethal Weapon 3)

Martin Riggs

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

Laura Lippman

Happiness is pleasure without regret

Leo Tolstoy

Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.

Roger Kahn

Ah, you dumb sonovabitch, why’d you let your warrior go?

S.W. Frank

Regrets of the past can be turned into seeds to grow a more positive future or unlearned, doomed to repeat the same.

Tambré Bryant

Maybe I might be repeating the same mistake again... But don't you think it is far better to regret what I have done than what I have not done yet...?

Hiroko Sakai

Could it really be this easy to land a handsome man? If so, why didn't I try it ages ago?

Steve Hockensmith

But of, but what, but whether, but who, but nevertheless, but insofar, but why, but otherwise, but even if-

Clifford Chase

I need you to know that no matter what happens, it was worth it to me. Being with you, loving you. It was all worth it.

Jenny Han

I'd watch her, amazed at just how much a person could accomplish fueled by tea and regret.

Katja Millay

My phone is on my bed, whispering in my ear like a bottle of scotch to a recovering alcoholic, while the rain continues cackling at me through my window.

Katja Millay

I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't give you everything you wanted. I wasn't everything you wanted. You were everything I wanted.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Don't overthink things. Sometimes you can convince your head not to listen to your heart. Those are the decisions you regret for the rest of your life." Faith Barnett From Texas Tangle

Leah Braemel

It was like we were both trying to hold onto something that was slipping through our fingers, and we didn't understand why. I understood more than him, of course, but just barely. I would never fully understand how I could have ever strayed from such a warm, sensitive and caring soul.

S.C. Stephens

Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

Bob Seger

Mr. Upchurch,” she fumbled. “I . . . I must take my leave directly. But before I go, allow me to say how sorry I am for the callous way I treated you in the past. I regret it most keenly.” His heart squeezed even as he felt his brows rise. “Do you?” She swallowed. “I was wrong about you. I was wrong about a great many things.

Julie Klassen

Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.

Samuel Park

I'm not big on regret - until time travel actually exists, it seems like a waste of making yourself feel bad

Julie Klausner

Things that are easily done are often much harder to undo. Sometimes, impossible.

Janette Rallison

When Olivier had been taken away Gamache had sat back down and stared at the sack. what could be worse than Chaos, Despair, War?What would even the Mountain flee from? Gamache had given it a lot of thought.What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And Gamache thought he had the answer.Regret. Regret for things said, for things done, and not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.Finally, when he was alone, the Chief Inspector had opened the sack and looking inside had realize he'd been wrong. The worst thing of all wasn't regret.

Louise Penny

Until I met you," she said, "I never realized how precious each day could be. When I was working, each day was over before I knew it, and then a week just flew by, and then a whole year...What have I been doing all this time? Why didn't I meet you before? If I had to choose a whole year in the past, or a day with you-I'd choose a day with you...

Shūichi Yoshida

I won't regret, because you can grow flowers where dirt used to be.

Kate Nash

I'm sorry, I say. I didn't give you everything you wanted. I wasn't everything you wanted. You were everything I wanted.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

You are not going to be the girl I’m going to marry are you? You are going to be the girl that got away.

Angela Richardson

Ain't no deserving, or otherwise,' Silo said, his bass voice rolling out from deep in his chest. 'There's what is, and what ain't, and there's what you do about it. Regret's just a way to make you feel okay when you're not making amends. A man can waste a life with regrets.

Chris Wooding

Regret, Joss. Regret does awful things to a person.

Samantha Young

No pain is unbearable except that of regret.

Jan Cox Speas

We find that one person in life that will stand by us through everything, support us, love us regardless of yourself. That one person that will stand by your side through everything. Grab onto that person with everything for if you don't then one day you will look to your side expecting him to be there and you will find that he is not. So don't take the one for granted that makes you his life. If you do then he will remove you from his...

Albert Besselaar

It’s easy to point out someone else’s mistake, harder to recognize your own. Especially because most people—except the lucky few like ourselves—are forced to live with their mistakes. So they learn to justify their mistakes, build on them, until they can look back and convince themselves that their mistake was inevitable all along, a good choice, in fact. An unwed teenage mother can look back at her unexpected pregnancy fondly six years down the road once the child’s out of her hair and in school all day. She wouldn’t dare go back and fix that mistake because it’s become part of her life.

Andrea Lochen

But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here.

Terry Tempest Williams

Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn't have to pull it down and use it on yourself.

Dennis McFarland

Fear waters the weeds of regret.

Steve Maraboli

Did you have any yourself?" she said."Just one."Harold thought of David, but it was too much to explain. He saw the boy as a toddler and how his face darkened in sunshine like a ripe nut. He wanted to describe the soft dimples of flesh at his knees, and the way he walked in his first pair of shoes, staring down, as if unable to credit they were still attached to his feet. He thought of him lying in hit cot, his fingers so appallingly small and perfect over his wool blanket. You could look at them and fear they might dissolve beneath your touch.Mothering had come so naturally to Maureen. It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out. She knew how to swing her body so that a baby slept; how to soften her voice; how to curl her hand to support his head. She knew what temperature the water should be in his bath, and when he needed to nap, and how to knit him blue wool socks. He had no idea she knew these things and he had watched with awe, like a spectator from the shadows. It both deepened his love for her and lifted her apart, so that just at the moment when he thought their marriage would intensify, it seemed to lose its way, or at least set them in different places. He peered at his baby son, with his solemn eyes, and felt consumed with fear. What if he was hungry? What if he was unhappy? What if other boys hit him when he went to school? There was so much to protect him from, Harold was overwhelmed. He wondered if other men had found the new responsibility of parenting as terrifying, or whether it had been a fault that was only in himself. It was different these days. You saw men pushing buggies and feeding babies with no worries at all.

Rachel Joyce

After that came her biggie: a triple murder--her dealer, the dealer's sister, and the dealer's sister's boyfriend.Reading that made me feel a little funny that we'd fucked and I'd loved her.

George Saunders

We can spend today joyously celebrating potential by acting upon our purpose, or we can spend it mourning the days and opportunities gone by… the first will find you amongst the few who are content and accomplished; the latter will find you with the suffering majority as you exhaustedly swim in the ocean of regret.

Steve Maraboli

She needs to make one phone call, and she wishes she could make it into her past. Into last year. Or two years ago.

Adele Griffin

There are three things that robots cannot do," wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote "Show preference without reason (LOVE)" and then "Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)" and finally "Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).

Lydia Netzer

Why?” I asked him tiredly. “What would it have changed? What could you possibly have said that would have made a difference?”“That I was your brother, Harry,” he said. “That I loved you. That I knew a few things about denying the dark parts of your nature. And that we would get through it.” He put his elblows on his knees and rested his forehead on his hands. “That we’d figure it out. That you weren’t alone.” Stab.Twist.He was right. It was just that simple.

Jim Butcher

For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.

Marcel Proust

The real regrets in life are the risks you didn't take.

Habeeb Akande

No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with.

Richard K. Morgan

He took her hand without question, without fear, and he never regretted it.

Jessica Fortunato

SONG OF DAWNI saw the sun rise by accident.It was a horrible sight.Annoyed by its splendor, I sought refugein a moist pillow, and lay there, alone,at the dawn of another day,that brought me closer to another death,pondering the vanity of my solitude,the vanity of procrastination,and the tiresome inevitability of waking upagain the same person.It might still be possible to change,but obstinately I remain the same,hoping that others might take solacein my consistency.But perhaps they take no solace in it,perhaps they too find it tedious.

John Tottenham

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.

André Aciman

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Anne Tyler

Maybe that’s why I get frustrated sometimes, because there’s no one to blame for how our lives have turned out. I wouldn’t change any of the things I’ve done, but at the same time I wish things were different than they are. I have no regrets, but there’s also no satisfaction in where I am.

Chris Dietzel

It was a night of early spring,The winter-sleep was scarcely broken;Around us shadows and the windListened for what was never spoken.Though half a score of years are gone,Spring comes as sharply now as then—But if we had it all to doIt would be done the same again.It was a spring that never came;But we have lived enough to knowThat what we never have, remains;It is the things we have that go.

Sara Teasdale

Tex's head snapped in my direction.Fuckin' A, woman, you've never had a s'more? he boomedI shook my head.Christ, everyone's gotta have a s'more before they die. Fuck that shit, I'll build a fire in my backyard tonight and I'll stop by Kumar's on the way home to get the stuff. Everyone can come by-

Kristen Ashley

Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.

Orson Scott Card

The trouble with ‘if only’ is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way – backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock – an excuse for not trying anymore.

Arthur Gordon

Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for.

Édith Piaf

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.

Hanif Kureishi

She had lost him. Lost him because she'd let him go. And she could not allow herself to regret that decision.

Harriet Evans

We all have different lives, Martin believes – but in the end probably feel the same things, and regret the fear we thought might somehow sustain us.

Simon Van Booy

I prefer to love the one my heart has chosen for me, and I won’t regret it

M.F. Moonzajer

It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.

Mary Balogh

This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

Victor Hugo

Enjoy your freedom today, leave the regret for tomorrow.

M.F. Moonzajer

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Regret Quotes

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