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"Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?"
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"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."

"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."

"We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old."

"Don't live in regret! It is such a useless idea.Use the memory to prevent us do bad things!Regret is a childish wish, or an empty hope,trying to revise the bitter memory of the past."

"What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don't believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place."

"Why wasn't I nicer to Alice? When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should say something to her, but before I can find the words, she's tooting her horn and disappearing down the street.I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn't nicer."
Explore more quotes by Janet Fitch

"The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine."

"I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language."

"His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute."

"Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard."

"Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us."

"Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you."

"Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."

"In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show."

"They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising."
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