Regret Quotes - Page 30

• I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.

  Peter S. Beagle

  Tears, Want, Unicorn

  Peter S. Beagle (1968). “The Last Unicorn”, Roc

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• Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden

  R. A. Salvatore

  Believe, Moving, Responsibility

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• Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.

  Colm Toibin

  Pain, Attachment, Feelings

  "The Empty Family: Stories". Book by Colm Toibin, October 1, 2010.

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• The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

  Marcel Proust

  Memories, Years, Space

  Marcel Proust (2003). “In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's”, ePenguin

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• You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

  Junot Diaz

  Junot Diaz (2008). “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, p.31, Faber & Faber

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• The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

  Oscar Wilde

  Past, Anxiety, Denial

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.96, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Book, Reading, Important

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• When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mistake, Errors, Judgement

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• When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

  Julian Barnes

  Thinking, Ignorant, Deterioration

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.

  Jan Neruda

  Moving, Eye, Sea

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• You can't regret a whole period in your life. . . . It's part of who you are, one of your stories.

  Laura Fraser

  Stories, Periods, Whole

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• It's better to have something to remember than anything to regret.

  Frank Zappa

  Remember

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• How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Skins, Saws, Crime

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.412, Faber & Faber

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• Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Revenge, Pain, Memories

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1829). “The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Complete in One Volume”, p.232

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• So, have you been enjoying yourself these days, Kazami?' I'm having lots of fun.' It was true. That made the sense of regret even keener, that this time in my life would soon be a thing of the past. I felt as if I could understand a little of what my mother had been through, and the feelings she may have had at different times. I wasn't a child anymore, and this made me feel awfully lonesome, and utterly alone.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Mother, Fun, Children

  Banana Yoshimoto (1995). “N.P.: A Novel”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

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• I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.

  Anais Nin

  Silence, Ease, Want

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• It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.

  Mary Renault

  Believe, Men, Trying

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• I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

  Richard Russo

  Father, Feelings, Together

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• And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning. I tried to smile. For him.

  Katherine Applegate

  Sadness, Mourning, Missing

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• To each their own. One must live each day so that there are no regrets.

  Arina Tanemura

  No Regrets, Each Day, Live Each Day

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• There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.

  Charles Dickens

  Hard Times, Long, Remembrance

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.7501, Delphi Classics

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• Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Book, Ideas, People

  Pseudonymous Bosch (2011). “The Name of this Book is Secret: The Secret Series”, p.7, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• Out of love, No regrets-- Though the goodness Be wasted forever. Out of love, No regrets-- Though the return Be never.

  Langston Hughes

  Forever, Return, Goodness

  Langston Hughes (2001). “The poems, 1951-1967”, University of Missouri

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• I smiled at him as best I could and pushed the paper across the table before he could change his mind. Because Henry DeVille was correct - there was an ingredient in my baking more concenctrated than any extract, more pungent than any spice; an ingredient that everyone would recognize and no one was able to name: it was regret, and it rose when one least expected.

  Jodi Picoult

  Names, Rose, Mind

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules”, p.689, Simon and Schuster

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• The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

  Ted Hughes

  Hurt, Fear, Heart

  Ted Hughes (2011). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, p.514, Faber & Faber

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