#regret

I imagine what would happen if everyone turned their regrets into wishes, went around shouting them. ↗

— Nina LaCour

#regrets #wishes #imagination

We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them. ↗

— Anna Godbersen

#love #regrets #sins #love

I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father. "God has lots of potential," he said. "When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?" "That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#dying #fathers #life #loss #regrets

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

#death #greed #grief #growing-up #lost

I've never regretted it. Questioned it? Sure. But never regretted." "Is there a difference?" I ask. "Absolutely. Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future. I questioned a lot about my relationship with your father. People make spontaneous decisions based off of their hearts all the time. There's so much more to relationships than just love. ↗

— Colleen Hoover

#regret #change

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#longing #regret #self #dreams

and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry! ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#change

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

— M.F. Moonzajer

#love #prefer #regret #love

The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. ↗

— Rachel Joyce

#marriage #regret #relationships #marriage

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost. ↗

— P.D. James

#regret #love