Quotes about Regret

I wish I had been home more when the children were growing up. I missed a lot.

I didn't even go to college. I wish I did.

Every President I think I've ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn't quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

When you're working in front of the camera, there are always things that occur to you after the director has said 'Cut.' I could probably, if I sat down and thought about it, come up with instances where I wished I had made this particular choice or that particular choice.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

I woke up many mornings not knowing what I'd done the night before. I'm amazed I'm not dead.

Remorse is annoyance at yourself for having passed up something that's to your benefit. But if it's to your benefit it must be good—something a truly good person would be concerned about. But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure. So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.

I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Sorry solves nothing.

This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here Let's stop there. I intend to get out