regret

What if I had told the boy I loved to leave and it ended up being for nothing?

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all.

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.

For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one__ time, not in getting to know what one__ love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one__ grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.

We all have regrets. Anyone who says they have none is a liar, and anyone who thinks they'll live without acquiring some is a fool.

My attitude is born out of necessity. I've made mistakes. I've made decisions I regretted. I know what it's like to live with regret. I live with it everyday. But if I let it take over, I'd never get out of bed in the morning.

We only understand the true love of our lives when we bound ourself within the boundries of right and wrong.

Things that are easily done are often much harder to undo. Sometimes, impossible.

It was like we were both trying to hold onto something that was slipping through our fingers, and we didn't understand why. I understood more than him, of course, but just barely. I would never fully understand how I could have ever strayed from such a warm, sensitive and caring soul.

Enjoy your freedom today, leave the regret for tomorrow.

I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.

She had lost him. Lost him because she'd let him go. And she could not allow herself to regret that decision.

There are three things that robots cannot do," wrote Maxon. Then beneath that on the page he wrote three dots, indented. Beside the first dot he wrote "Show preference without reason (LOVE)" and then "Doubt rational decisions (REGRET)" and finally "Trust data from a previously unreliable source (FORGIVE).

Don__ choose to walk the well-worn path to regret.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Fear waters the weeds of regret.

Regret, Joss. Regret does awful things to a person.

Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams... countless echoes of 'could have' and 'should have'_ Don__ choose to walk the well-worn path to regret.