regret

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

No," I say. "I didn't know that," and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me.

How it's so easy for her to not feel anything at all, to be just completely gone, to not be around to see how fucked up she's made me. She got to disappear completely and I feel like I'm about to combust.

This is what I want so don't be sad.

I was so blinded by her talent that I didn't recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

You will find yourself with a beautiful boy and you will not want to stay in that room, with him, even though there is nothing more you can ask for in another human beingand there is nothing you can do about this.

Like alcohol and poverty, a heartbreak has the power to make a man do something he wouldn__ normally do and to make a woman do someone she wouldn__ normally do.

No matter what sort of car you are driving or how fast you drive, we all meet behind the same red light.

I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.Wheeler's class and Mondawmin Mall, somewhere between the schools and the streets. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though 'The Waste Land,' or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, had not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster.

One of the most terrifying things I fear is not my potential, but how much regret I__l die with should I never use it.

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. (__nto a new life_)

Geraldine keeps her eyes trained on him as she slowly reaches into her purse, wrapping her fingers around her gun. __Callo, I__ so sorry that your life ended up this way,_ she sighs as she gets out of her side of the car, her feet burning from the cold as her high heels sink into the fallen snow. __ren__ you scared?_____ you, Geraldine_ I fell into the same trap as you, anyway,_ Callo answers. His large eyes are shining with tears, but he doesn__ seem afraid in the least. __The dead don__ feel anything, you know_ not even guilt or regret. So, what is there to be afraid of?

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

Don't be scared," Willa Mae said.I looked at her. "Aren't you scared?"Willa Mae looked at me and said, "Shoot. Only thing I'm afraid of is that I'm going to do something I'll regret.""Being scared is just one more thing to turn into what you want it to be," Willa Mae said. "The thing with fear is, it's like anger. You've got to change it into something else. Make it your weapon. Some can just turn it into smarts. The best of 'em can turn fear and anger into love." She looked out toward our neighborhood. "I'm not there yet.

If you are afraid to take a chance, take one anyway. What you don't do can create the same regrets as the mistakes you make.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.