regret

The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.

I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I__l forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy__: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me__ prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.

More tears rushed from the depths of her tortured soul. ... The losses piled up.

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.

Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder__ declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.

Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.

I felt like an integral part of my being had just been ripped out of me, only to have it replaced with something that did not belong.

Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second guessing.

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.

Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.

Finallya day will come whenwoken by the xylophoneof sunthroughblindsyou__l realisethat the beach was not the placewhere horses tore the sandto ribbonthat the scent of him has liftedfrom the last of the sheetsthat he isn__ coming backthat it hasn__ rainedbut the birds are pretending that it hasso they can sing

She didn't know if she was crying because Illukar was going to die, or because Ieskar already had.

...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend.That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

It could have been avoided. This couch misery spiral, this _ loss _ I could__e avoided the bulk of it simply by doing more. I could__e given a shit...

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.