c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy
—  you can't build on it
No trouble ever got fixed late at night," he said. "Midnight is for regrets.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.
— Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
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.
— Neil Gaiman, The Wake
Never regret trusting someone. It proves you have a heart. But if he turns out to be a lying worm ... I'm not going to waste my time crying. Because I am way too fabulous for that.
— Jude Watson, Beyond the Grave
My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.
— Jodi Picoult, House Rules
Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.
— John Wooden, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court
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.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimaera, children of regret...
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
My jealousy is a living thing. Shifting, changing, growing. Like my rage and my mother's regret.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
I just wish I’d asked you sooner. We could’ve had ages . . . months . . . years maybe. . . .
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
And at that moment Jude thought something that he would never forgive himself for.He wished that he had never met any of them.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Speak when you're angry, and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.
— Lawrence J. Peters
Man, don't ever be sorry you don't want to kill someone.
— Michael  Grant, Gone
Do you still believe that if you truly want something enough it can happen?" I ask. I think of all the times I wanted to stop the world from spinning, all the times I wanted to go back and start over again. All the things I've wanted to undo or take back. Did I not want them enough?
— Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves
Sorry I painted the word 'twat' on your garage door.
— David Shrigley
No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future
— Umar ibn Al-Khattab
The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
— Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.
— Lisa See, Peony in Love
She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes, he took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed .
— Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time
—  it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Name me no names for my disease,With uninforming breath;I tell you I am none of these,But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,For brooks that I had crossed,...Before I met this flesh and boneAnd followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,Yet name no name of ills.Say only, "Here is where he passed,Seeking again those hills.
— Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems: A Sequence
I wouldn't waste a day, not an hour, not a moment. Take what you want and damn caution. Live, enjoy. Feed ravenously. Or the biggest regret you'll have at the end of your life is wasted time.
— Nora Roberts, Genuine Lies
That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
I stepped closer to him and lowered my voice. 'If you could change one thing, what would it be?'He pulled the sheep pendant from his pocket. A question filled his eyes. I held out my hand. Riley placed it in my palm and I curled my finger around the necklace, pressing the metal into my skin.
— Maria V. Snyder, Outside In
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
— Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity
Already she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go, and she knew that it was enought to bury her alive.
— Anna Godbersen, The Luxe
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. 
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
— Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background
I have stared into the light and you are all my shadows.
— Mike Carey, Lucifer, Vol. 5: Inferno
I still loved Marc desperately and couldn’t imagine life without him. Jace was…something else. Something I could feel but couldn’t articulate. Something I wanted, and hadn’t been able to resist in my grief-weakened state. He was something that would have to wait.
— Rachel Vincent, Prey
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.
— P.D. James, The Children of Men
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.
— Anne Lamott
One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.
— Graham Greene, The Human Factor
But you know all about that, being sorry and having no words to say something when you know you should but you just can't
— Heather Gudenkauf, The Weight of Silence
And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Being safe doesn't mean you won't be sorry.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.
— Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces
— C.S. Lewis
More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...
— Sandra Worth, Lady of the Roses: A Novel of the Wars of the Roses
I don't buy 'regret' idea. I need life's good lesson.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling the present.- From Under the Tuscan Sun, 2003
— Movie Quote
Some of our children are our justifications and some are but our regrets.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Its better to regrets what you did, than regret what you didn't do.
— William Nolan
Those silly girls had no idea what they were really celebrating. They had no idea what it took to bring Agatha and her friends together seventy-five years ago. The Women's Society Club had been about supporting one another, about banding together to protect one another because no one else would. But it had turned into an ugly beast, a means by which rich ladies would congratulate themselves by giving money to the poor. And Agatha had let it happen. All her life, it seemed, she was making up for things she let happen.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper
That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.
— Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
Jesus, Dolores, you've got to get yourself together. You've got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes - okay? - and get your fucking head right."Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He'd closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.Softer. That would have been nice.
— Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else--grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.
— Beverly Cleary, Fifteen
The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring. [p. 199]
— Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom
I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...
— China Miéville, Embassytown
To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently abeast!
— William Shakespeare, Othello and the Tragedy of Mariam
Oh God, Oh God! that it were possibleTo undo things done; to call back yesterday!That time could turn up her swift and sandy glass,To untell days, and to redeem these hours.
— Thomas Heywood
Opportunities are rare in this life, and fairness, rarer still. So, when you discover a fair opportunity, go after as if it were your last because it very well might be.
— Joel T. McGrath
I wish my life were a movie and I could take it into the editing room and totally cut this part out. And some other parts. Some other parts definitely need to be cut.
— Susane Colasanti, Take Me There
Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
My handling of the situation with Jake proved that I was the same girl from eight years ago. I'd just gained a stone and lost my love for Shayne Ward.
— Lynsey James, The Broken Hearts Book Club
Careful, Sandi. You're about to let your bulldog mouth overload your bird-dog bite.
— Peggy Webb, The Mona Lucy
When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
The tragedy of Dionysus: Wear a black robe at night, and white you’ll wear by morning; but wear a purple robe to the midnight feast, and when you wake you’ll dress in black to mourn your soul deceased.
— Roman Payne, Crepuscule
There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.
— David Rakoff, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.
— Gregory Maguire, The Next Queen of Heaven
It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.
— Jodi Picoult
Love yourself
—  you won’t regret it ever.
At the crossroad in my life, I didn't know which way to go. I just mindlessly choose a random direction... then, after regretting my decision I tried to retrace my steps. However, without even realizing it the sun had already set.
— Nobuyuki Fukumoto
A woman once held a Canary in the palm of her hand and stroked her and whispered a careful warning. The canary, seeking some freedom to fly, went into the mine while the woman watched in worry. The mine was filled with toxic gases and the Canary began to sing. She flew into danger, realized the threats around her, and wished to return to a place of refuge.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Might-have-been are insidious, aren't they, in the way they don't ever quite lie still or go away.
— Patrick Gale
Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.
— R.C. Robertson-Glasgow
Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?
— Ali Smith, Autumn
Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it?
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea.
— Seneca, Consolations
I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or a means of self-justification but because it is true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much. This may be an over-analytical way of looking at things. Don't you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not over-analytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. "This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which such-and-such."Like that. I can't tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or complicate it.In any case, I myself feel that I am far closer to recovery than I once was, and people here tell me this is true. This is the first time in a long while I have been able to sit down and calmly write a letter. The one I wrote you in July was something I had to squeeze out of me (though, to tell the truth, I don't remember what I wrote - was it terrible?), but this time I am very calm. How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course, once I do put them to words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And so I am writing to you.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Never apologize for correct actions.
— R.J.  Lawrence, The Xactilias Project
In memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, 'To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have bee.
— Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
Don’t live in regret over missed opportunities, for if you do, you will miss even more.
— Charbel Tadros
I think we’re already dead, dude. Not everyone, just Deckers. The whole Death-Cast thing seems too fantasy to be true. Knowing when our last day is going down so we can live it right? Straight-up fantasy. The first afterlife kicks off when Death-Cast tells us to live out our day knowing it’s our last; that way we’ll take full advantage of it, thinking we’re still alive. Then we enter the next and final afterlife without any regrets
— Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End
A man without regrets cannot be cured.
— Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Look forward. Every regret, every mournful thought, takes so much out of your life.
— Prentice Mulford, Thoughts Are Things
There will always remain more ashes than remorse.
— Hubert Haddad, Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters
Doubt holds us back from doing the things we love.
— Avina Celeste
Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious.
— Michael   Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
This was the first time I had not just rushed in and followed my instincts, and it wasn't working out. I was beginning to actively regret it.
— Gwenda Bond, Triple Threat
I would remember them forever–their names, my reasons, the way their bodies slumped in death and their eyes stared through me. If I stopped, if I let their deaths weigh me down and keep me from being Opal, it was all for nothing. There was no going back. I was what I was, and they were a part of me now.
— Linsey Miller, Mask of Shadows
Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret.
— Patrick Ness, Release
Live for the moments to die for
— Robin Dabhi
Just as she was about to turn, she caught a whiff of something sweet. She inhaled deeply, instinctively wanting to savor it, but then she nearly choked when it landed on her tongue with a bitter taste. It was so strong she actually made a face.That, her grandmother had described to her once after making a particularly bad lemon cream pie, was exactly what regret tasted like.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper
There is much to be said for cherry blossoms, but they seem so flighty. They are so quick to run off and leave you. And then just when your regrets are the strongest the wisteria comes into bloom, and it blooms on into the summer. There is nothing quite like it. Even the color is somehow companionable and inviting.
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
I am certain that I’m not the only one who would like to have a do-over on an interaction with a loved one.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
When the bonfire of love still smolders in the wake of emotional convulsions, seeds of regret and remorse may endlessly linger about on the path of life. ("Taken for a ride)
— Erik Pevernagie
He wanted his old life back instead of this new hell on earth that he had created for himself.
— Valenciya Lyons
When I tried to washthe ghosts from my head,what I washed away was my whole life instead.
— Preston W. Long
Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.
— Ivan Doig, English Creek
Was this the stupidest thing I had ever done? Maybe, maybe not. Top ten, at least.
— Dennis Liggio, Support Your Local Monster Hunter
Li, a willowy manboy with a shock of black hair atop a mouthful of bad teeth was the brother-in-law he had introduced to industrial espionage several years back. Rong often regretted that.
— Michael Benzehabe
The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldy enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
— Ted Hughes
I did it, and it's all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn't have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.
— Michael "Bommi" Baumann
For with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead—a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller's till, its gold transmuted back to lead.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
No one decision in life is so big that you have to live the rest of your life in regret. You can always make a new decision and turn things around.
— Hrishikesh Agnihotri
Rarely do you regret what you have done nearly as much as what you have failed to do.
— Jeffrey Fry
Regret drives us to repentance, and repentance leads us to God.
— Francine Rivers, An Echo in the Darkness
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
— Albert Camus, The Fall
There's a quote of hers [Lucille Ball] that I've always loved: 'I guess I would rather regret the things I've done than to regret the things I've never done.
— Carol Burnett, In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox
Bravery is the solution to regret.
— Robin S. Sharma
Which was worse, telling a person you loved them when you didn’t mean it? Or loving them and never telling them at all?
— Martina Boone, Illusion
Get correct views of life, and learn to see the world in its true light. It will enable you to live pleasantly, to do good, and, when summoned away, to leave without regret.
— Robert E. Lee
I want a chance to do it all again. To do it… right.
— Joe Abercrombie
I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?
— Blake Crouch, Dark Matter
She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark.A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain 
— Alice Munro, Runaway
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Feelings of regret represent our aversion to reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All people share doubts. The lingering question that eventually worms it way into all thinking people’s brain is how to live splendidly and how to die without remorse and regret.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The point is that everyone needs some exposure to the various ways of life. People buy things out of catalogues too much. They see in Time magazine that they're suppose to be feeling in such and such a way, and they dash off a check and buy that life-style sight unseen. A pig in a poke if there ever was one, for once you've bought the thing there's no refund. We ought to be able to try things before we sign up for them. Used to be you could listen to the records in a record store before you bought them. Now they're sealed, for your protection, they say. Bullshit! It's for their goddamned protection, not ours. We don't need to be protected. We need to be allowed to get a taste of something before we accept it.
— Arthur Alexander
The cern paled, and all the courageous which accompanied him into the conversation was now all done away. He shrunk back, his audacity dwizzening under the teneberous gloom of the giant’s long shadow. He turned to entreat the help of his fellow soldiers with desperate looks, but there was little more than half of the regiments left behind him, all of them unwilling to intervene, and his bowels rumbled, his heart sinking into the grave of conscience, and never had he felt more mistaken in his conduct.
— Michelle Franklin
How we begin and how we end any relationship is a product of planning, fortuity, and personality. Many enterprises commenced in good faith spiral into confusion, discord, and disarray, generate turmoil and corruption, sunburn the sensitive parties, and conclude in a cesspool of regret and animosity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Regret is not the same as guilt. It is expressed by: ‘I can’t believe I did that. It’s not like me. This is not how I am! How could I do such a thing?’ It means to see ourselves as the best we can be, and to be disappointed in not living up to that.
— Yael Shahar, A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption
Regret and remorse” is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( “Island of regret. Island of remorse” )
— Erik Pevernagie
No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.
— Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool
12 Things To Ditch For A Great DayBlameGuiltWorryRegretResentmentEntitlementSelf-pityLazinessNegative attitudeFear of embarrassmentUrge to one-up othersYour comfort zone
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
Can one regret a thing that, however unwise, was beautiful?
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
It is not the jumps you made in your life but mostly the jumps you haven’t made are the real source of regrets in your life!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Explanations are ghosts of guilt, shadows of sympathy, and I have no use for them.
— Jessica Dawson, Fossil Fuels
The room had lost its morning light, the glow of expectation and potential. The daylight was now gray, and the new day was already used, a little soiled by mistaken thoughts and makeshift undertakings.
— Tove Jansson
She cried aloud, with a great mourning cry for all that she had never known in this life, and the agony of a bereavement unguessed till this moment.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
Regrets are a waste of time and waste of time brings about regrets. It's the best ironic cycle after life and death!
— Adhish Mazumder
She was stung by sharp regret thinking about the sheets and tablecloths, so costly and never used due to excessive regard.
— Paolo Giordano
I was Pandora, bound and determined to open that box.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix
I will not let us be beings of regret. I know my past. What I want is my future.
— Roshani Chokshi, The Star-Touched Queen
They were too near to me. I loved them to much. And the love overtaking me and combined with the fact that I was going to spend another evening alone, doing nothing with it, being waited down to motionlessness by my own actions made me want to get it over with and fucking be alone.
— Courtney Maum, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You
Enough regret can crush any man, living or dead.
— Marlo Berliner, The Ghost Chronicles
To avoid a comparative poverty, which her affection and her society would have deprived of all its horrors, I have, by raising myself to affluence, lost everything that could make it a blessing.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Are you all right? With your Guild, I mean?"Alain considered the question. "They suspect me of being attracted to a Mechanic. They are right, but so far lack proof. They do not suspect that I love you, or who you are, but I have no doubt of what they will do if they discover either of those things." "Oh, blazes." Mari lowered her head to rest her brow against the cool stone of the fortification. "I have ruined your life." "You have given me back my life.
— Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle
Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
— Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
We regret because we fail to listen to an inner voice that says "I Can" and we watch as that pledge is hushed by our doubts and fears. We regret because we listened to someone else's voice rather than our own or because we knew what was right and didn't do it. Imagine a life where we trusted ourselves more, believed what others said less and committed to do what was noble. There would be no regret in that.
— Jason Versey, A Walk with Prudence
I stilled. I was sure I'd imagined that all too familiar voice, but there he was. His bright blue eyes saying far more than his words ever could. His iris' held pain and anger and my shame increased tenfold. How foolish I was to think what I'd done would matter to him, or how his reaction would mean so much to me.
— Freedom Matthews, Inherited
Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand
When all you wanted was to be wanted, you wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now.
— Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift: Fearless
The road home is tinged with regret and the road forward is full of the unknown.
— Joaquin Lowe, Bullet Catcher
Because even if you buried yourself in guilt, you can't go back and change what happened.
— Katherine Fleet, The Secret to Letting Go
Regret is like a mental parasite that alters your behavior.
— Peter Tieryas, United States of Japan
In hours of bliss we oft have met:They could not always last;And though the present I regret,I'm grateful for the past.
— William Congreve
Consider the odd morphology of regret.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
When you have given your best, you are left with no regrets.
— Abdul Mueed
Death changes everyone....It changes the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you live your life. Sometimes it makes you thankful for what you have, but more often than not, it makes you regret what you've lost.
— Tara Sivec, Watch over Me
I never wanted to regret the kisses I missed.
— Lynsey Addario, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
I never want to regret the kisses I missed.
— Lynsey Addario, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War
I refuse to live a life of regret. I refuse to hope things will get better in the future when I have complete control over making them the best possible right here and now. We have one life-and none of us knows how long our life will be or what will becomme of it. The possibilities are truly infinite.
— Connor Franta, A Work in Progress
You realize how much you love someone once that someone is gone…gone forever, and you are filled with regret and sadness.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
What you don't sweat out when you're young will turn into tears when you're old.
— Japanese Proverb
And maybe that's all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.
— Nicole Kornher-Stace
Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
— Samuel Beckett, Murphy
If you are single and don't want to be. The only regret is staying that way.
— Suzette R. Hinton
I don't fear death, I fear I haven't done enough before it happens
— Aryan Xebat‎
And the General regrets the night.
— T. Mountebank, Sister Sable
There’s no great dividing line between being a kid and an adult. We’re not all caterpillars turning into butterflies. You are what you are. When you grow up, you may be more careful than when you were a kid. You don’t say what you think as much as you once did. You learn to play nice. But you’re still the same person who did good things or rotten things when you were young. Whether you feel good about them or bad … whether you regret them. Well, that’s a different thing. But it’s not like they disappear forever.
— Matthew Dicks, The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs
he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Markheim
The waves of regret were gentle, but I knew they would ripple on forever.
— Yōko Ogawa
I had too much fun was no one's last regret ever.
— Jonathan Heatt, Teaching Snapping Turtles How To Chew Bubblegum
The more conscious I was of all the good and of all this "beautiful and lofty," the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it. But the main feature was that this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so. As if it were my most normal condition and in no way a sickness or a blight, so that finally I lost any wish to struggle against this blight. I ended up almost believing (and maybe indeed believing) that this perhaps was my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, how much torment I endured in this struggle! I did not believe that such things happened to others, and therefore kept it to myself all my life as a secret. I was ashamed (maybe I am ashamed even now); it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormal, mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day, and again that what had been done could in no way be undone, and I would gnaw, gnaw at myself with my teeth, inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness, and finally-into a decided, serious pleasure! Yes, a pleasure, a pleasure! I stand upon it. The reason I've begun to speak is that I keep wanting to find out for certain: do other people have such pleasures? I'll explain it to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and enough faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Those who refuse to grow, those who only finish school and call it quits regret through life.
— Sunday Adelaja
If you commit then struggle to fulfill it at any cost otherwise regret it.
— Samreen Quyyum
All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.
— Paolo Giordano
Regrets begin the moment we're comfortable with settling.
— Andrena Sawyer
Any anger I feel vanishes. What is left cannot be described. It is guilt piled onto emptiness and set afire.
— Bryan Reardon, Finding Jake
I refuse to suffer the torment of regret that comes with living a “what if” life.
— Steve Maraboli
You're so young, you can't know the meaning of true regret. It's never what you've done, love, it's what you've left undone.
— Tessa Dare, Surrender of a Siren
If I don't take a chance with Gavin Murphy, I think I'll always regret it.
— Lex Martin, Dearest Clementine
Love passed me by and I failed to get the plates.
— Amanda Mosher, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in.
— Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
Look up, always. Look back, never.
— Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2
Things don't so much end as disappear. They don't so much begin as turn up. You think there will be a time to say goodbye, but people have often gone before you know about it. And I don't just mean the dying.
— Rachel Joyce, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
I don’t pretend to know much about love, but that’s how great love comes to an end, not in the flames of passion, but in the silence of regret.
— Joanne Harris, The Gospel of Loki
When you have no future, you live in the past.
— John Grisham, Sycamore Row
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?
— Janet Fitch
When I am running I inhabit and exit my body in the same moment. I bear witness to the harshest of physical sensations, even while I feel myself flying free and away. I do not want to remember what has happened to me. I do not want to reflect on the past. I can't in a way. I'm not made for regrets.
— Carrie Snyder, Girl Runner
I refuse to suffer the torment of regret that comes from living a "what if" life.
— Steve Maraboli
If he set out right now to make a list of the things he had taken for granted in his life, he’d go broke buying paper.
— James P. Blaylock, Night Relics
To regret your soul is to regret your past.
— Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
I do have a reason for my insanity. I fear regret.
— Shahrukh Ahmad
each of us humans has a moment-if not many-in which we lapse. for some, the transgression involves sex. for others, simply doubt or a rage so all encompassing, it impels us to make irreversible decisions.but whatever the transgression is doesn't really matter. what matters is that lapsing is our fate. we humans are doomed to it. worse, it is our destiny to look back longingly, with nostalgia, at our world before we changed, at who we were Before.we can never forget.but we can never go back.
— Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, Bittersweet
Having regrets is proof of being alive.
— Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Ten: Tenna Dōri No Kaidanji 14
I threw bitter tears at the ocean, but all that came back was the tide.
— Sarah McLachlan
The day I started fearing regret is the day I decided to never stop.
— Matthew Donnelly
The night of my accident, when I opened my eyes and you were there? Seeing you again, Rebecca...It was like someone let the air back into the room.
— Sarah Grimm, Midnight Heat
I miss you so much. I miss us. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t regret walking away from you.
— Sarah Grimm, Midnight Heat
Us? There is no us. You threw us away like yesterday’s trash.
— Sarah Grimm, Midnight Heat
Time doesn't run backward, you know, and things that have been done can't be undone, no matter how hard you wish.
— Mary Downing Hahn, The Doll in the Garden
If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.
— A.C. Grayling
I never want to regret. 'Regret' is the ugliest word.
— Peter Hedges, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Regret is more than inevitable, it's a constant companion. A relationship that becomes comfortable. Regret never wants to break up.
— Jim Mitchem, Minor King
You've turned out good.You've made me proud, Markos.I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don't know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
— Khaled Hosseini
It takes courage to own up your actions that hurt others, to look Into the eye and to mean the sorry, To accept the mistake and not deny, all of this needs courage.
— Mansi Soni
He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it for ever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?
— Alastair Reynolds
Obedience is less painful than regret.
— Christine Caine
There will be days you wish you’d never done it. And thosewill be the good times, when it’s only days of regret and notmonths.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
— Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand
Mal was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’m not sure who my first kill was. We were hunting the stag when we ran into a Fjerdan patrol on the northern border. I don’t think the fight lasted more than a few minutes, but I killed three men. They were doing a job, same as I was, trying to get through one day to the next, then they were bleeding in the snow. No way to tell who was the first to fall, and I’m not sure it matters. You keep them at a distance. The faces start to blur.”“Really?”“No.
— Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
Nought’s had, all’s spent, where our desire is got without content.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Any fighter knows that regret that doesn't inform your future is wasted emotion. If you lose and dwell on the missed opportunity rather than the chances to come, you're finished.
— Craig Lancaster, The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter
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.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I am not going to live with regret for not having tried.
— Kim Harrison, The Undead Pool
If you have trouble getting motivated always remember that time is going to pass either way and that eventually regret is going to make its way around.
— Matthew Donnelly
If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.
— David Mamet
There is one day that has brought me unspeakable pain, & the effects of that day continue to cover & erode my world like rust. I suspect that someday the rust will eat through the joists & posts of my life & I will topple, literally as well as figuratively.
— Richard Paul Evans, The Mistletoe Promise
And he had a theory about fear. It was all about regret. If you make what you want out of life and don't bullshit yourself about your choices, then there are no regrets, and a man without regret isn't afraid of anything.
— Mark Allen Smith, The Inquisitor
The problem with living without the person you can't live without is eventually realizing you can live without them.
— Charlaine Harris