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Regret Quotes


"Your temperament can drive people away from you and then you live a regrettable life."


"Those who die with their music still on their tongues unsung are trying to say "God had made a deal with the wrong customer like me"."


"God is the God of multiplication and a careless attitude toward the business of the kingdom bring regret to Him."


"Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel."


"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."


"Reckless youth makes rueful age."


"It is foolishness to want what never was or will never will be, lament the passage of time, and live in fearfulness of an uncertain future. The moods generated by regret including depression and self-loathing congeal in our sentient consciousness creating the painful landscape of the self."


"If there's anything worse in this world than a bad batch of babi guling, it's hindsight."


"Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another."



"There were so many places in my time with Rogerson that I wished I could go back to, hitting the stop button at just one moment to stop everything that came after. I had so many If Onlys, but each place I thought to stop meant missing something that came later. I needed it all, in the end, to make my own story find its finish."


"It doesn't matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again. Once you've started to leave, you will run your whole life."


"The only thing you can do with the dreams when you realize it's already morning is to regret wasting your life while you had all the time."


"Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn't go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen."


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


"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."


"He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated.'Sorry,' Persephone suggested.'Pardon?'She murmured, 'You should say sorry when you kill something.'It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. 'It was dying anyway.''Dying and dead are different words.'Shamed, Adam muttered an apology...."


"One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret."


"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."


"Our recollections bring out our joyful smiles, but hardly make us chortle or guffaw; our recollections often leave imprints on our faces that show our regrets, but they hardly produce sounds that echo the depth of those regrets."


"I wished I had told her what I was doing. I wished I had said more, argued more. Maybe then I wouldn't have this hollow ache in my chest whenever I thought of our parting words. Had she already moved on, forgotten me? In her position, what she said made sense, but the thought of her with someone else made me wish I had something to fight, to kill, just so I could forget."


"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."


"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."


"Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back " and at some point everyone looks back " she will hear her heart saying, "What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life."


"To waste time is to become wasted."


"There are many things in my life that I wish I could take back. Many moments I would recast."
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