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"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."
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"You see it everywhere and everyone seems to be doing it but you. You could have had it as well, and you know it, and that's what bothers you. Your worst enemy is yourself, and sadly, you know that what you did wasn't worth what you lost."

"One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one's regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different."

"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."

"Regrets are a terrible thing to live with but, if we take a good look at them, some are not regrets at all, they're situations that taught us a valuable lesson. Don't be so hard on yourself it's not a perfect world."

"Our regrets want to bring back many things we leave behind."

"You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn't. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didn't know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn't mine. It never has been."
Explore more quotes by Haruki Murakami

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive."

"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."

"The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl's skin, an old rock 'n' roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return."

"Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it not for anyone. People have't die, the body has't fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin' thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.In other words, immortality."

"The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh."

"A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much."
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