Janet Fitch

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought me from there to here. Should I regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if I could uncouple them? Do I regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine."

Janet Fitch

Mitch Albom

"Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."

Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala)

Carlos Gebler

"You can't change the past but, with understanding, you can sometimes draw the poison out of it."

Carlos Gebler

Haruki Murakami

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in ...a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than one or two such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Haruki Murakami

Jodi Picoult

"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."

Jodi Picoult

aimgirl

" I said that I don't need you
But I'm a liar
I swear I do
I do

Strip away vanity
Just as you consume me
Broken smile, starless sky
Save it all,
Say goodbye ... "

aimgirl

Haruki Murakami

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,but I don't believe that" he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else .... "

Haruki Murakami

Dean Young

" ... but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud."

Dean Young

The Counting Crows

"There's things I remember and things I forget. I miss you; I guess that I should."

Counting Crows

On regret

"Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret."

Ambrose Bierce

"Regret for the things we have done will be tempered by time. It is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

Sydney J. Harris

"It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams."

John Knowles

"As I grow older, I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me."

H. Rider Haggard

"May I surrender the past without regret, and accept the future without fear."

Brenda Jenkins Kleager

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

Alexander Graham Bell

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

Mitch Albom

"I will do you one last favour, in the name and memory of the figment you have replaced. I will clarify a misapprehension of yours. Circumstances did not conspire against me. I was not led into anything, nor did I fall. I chose my life and my course. I chose to do wrong in the hope that right might come of it. I regret it. I would choose differently now. But the choice was mine. Deny that, falsify it, tinsel it over with pious, pitying justification, and you deny everything I am and every scrap of what little good I have been able to do in my life. Good or bad, give me credit for what I have done. I would rather go honestly to Hell, admitting that I leaped knowingly into error and folly, than enter into the sweetest Heaven men can dream of by whining that I had been pushed."

Steven Brust

"Never regret anything. Because at one time it was exactly what you wanted."

Kelsey C. Lee

Kirsten Dewar

When you think of love, what comes to mind? A feather? Butterfly kisses? A colour? A scent? A particular person or place? A particular time, or season? A particular song?

To me love is a composite of all of these things, and more, an ever shifting, multi-faceted kaleidoscope, of light, and sound, and taste and feel. The smell of the earth after the spring rains. The blue of the sky on a cold Highveld morning. The sun reflecting off of an azure blue sea. A fiery sunset. A baby’s gurgle. A nightingale’s song. Puppy’s breath. Baking bread. A field of wild flowers. A daisy chain. The crisp, freshly minted smell trapped between the pages of a new book. The silences between the tick and the tock of the clock. The spaces between words. Jasmine in bloom. The green of water hyacinth. Snow. The way a genuine heartfelt smile reflects not only on the mouth, but in the eyes. Ice. Chilli. Feeling full, like there’s a ribbon, a river, a rainbow of colour and light waiting to escape from inside you. Happiness so vast, it’s more than your heart can hold. The sound of children laughing. The way your heart skips a beat when he says your name. How soft it sounds in his mouth. The heat and glow from a banked fire. Humility. Respect. Camaraderie. Rose petals scattered by a summer breeze. Crosses carried, burdens shared. A kitten’s purr. The whisper and sigh of the wind. The rasp of his stubble on your cheek. Cocoa beans. Marshmallows roasted on an open log fire. Kisses stolen. Kisses freely given. Ballet shoes. How, when he laces his fingers through yours, you can’t tell where he ends, and you begin. The lace trimming on a wedding dress. Old sepia photographs, taken long ago. Loyalty. The clamour of passion, the roar of blood through the veins, hunger, release. Friendship. The tremulous sparrow beat of his heart against your chest. Seeing a man’s eyes fill with tears on his granddaughter’s wedding day, because she reminds him of the bride he married fifty years before. A scattering of stars, nestled in velvet. Devotion, unceasing, unrelenting. Unconditional acceptance. Old love letters, carefully preserved, tied with a scarlet satin bow. Secret places. The knowledge that here, you belong. The smell of his scent on your skin. The oh so familiar contours left by his head, on your pillow. Comfortable silences. The whispered refrains of love.

There’s so much more to love than just a red heart.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Colm Tóibín

"..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine. "

Colm Tóibín