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"All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'."
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Exlpore more Regret quotes
"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 Fredrik Backman
"It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her."
"At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?"
"The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that."
"People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will 'lessen as time passes, but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it."
"Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy."
"She's fifteen, above the age of consent, and he's seventeen, but he's still 'the boy in every conversation. She's 'the young woman.Words are not small things."
"Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury."
"Because a time comes in every man's life when he decides what sort of man he's going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not."
"Until there are so many of them that no one dares to chase them anymore. Until they're an army in themselves. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal."
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