"He could swear he did not look back, could not-by any optical chance, or in any prism-have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture-which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never-consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past."

Regret, Memory, Remorse, Truth

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"He could swear he did not look back, could not-by any optical chance, or in any prism-have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture-which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never-consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past."

Exlpore more Regret quotes

"Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence."

Anais Nin, American Author

Regret, Confidence, Life, Choice

"Wasting and losing time is equivalent to wasting and losing your life."

Sunday Adelaja, Nigerian Author

Regret, Time, Waste, Life, Loss

"Sudden acquaintance brings repentance."

Thomas Fuller, English Clergyman

Regret, Choice, Consequence, Reflection

"Why compare yourself to others? You never know what people have endured to get where they are."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Regret, Comparison, Endurance, Strength, Life

"What matter most is not the sin. The moment of repentance: go and sin no more."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Regret, Matter, Sin, Repentance, Moment

"But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Regret, Motherhood, Choice, Emotion

"I wasn't able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we'd done the buttons up wrong."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

Regret, Relationship, Pain, Self

"Refusal to accept the truth is denial of divine self."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Regret, Truth, Denial, Divine

"The living dead do things without putting life into it."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Regret, Living, Life, Spirit

"The future is just wasted on some people."

Chuck Palahniuk, American Novelist

Regret, Future, Waste, Potential

Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

Existence

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."

Imagination

"The lost glove is happy."

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"Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."

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"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence."

Philosophy

"Who grins in official circumstances?"

Social

"Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me."

Emotion

"The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind."

Mind

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."

Time

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."

Poetry