"He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."
— Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

"Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict.
So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing.
-Drizzt Do'urden"
— R.A. Salvatore (Sea of Swords)

"Sorry I painted the word 'twat' on your garage door."
— David Shrigley

"Our biggest regrets are not for the things we have done but for the things we haven't done"
— Chad Michael Murray

"Your tongue is a rudder
It steers the whole ship,
Sends your words past your lips,
Or keeps them safe behind your teeth.
But the wrong words will strand you
Come of course while you sleep,
Sweep your boat out to sea
Or dashed to bits on the reef
"
— Play Crack the Sky by Brand New

"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

"Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other path, no other way, no day but today."
— Jonathan Larson - Rent

"Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed."
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

""The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.""
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.

Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel someday. This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"Now I know what they mean when they say 'to pull a Charlie Gordon.' I'm ashamed (41)."
— Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)

"It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!"
— Roman Payne (Hope and Despair)

"الندم هو صوت الفطرة لحظة الخطأ"
— مصطفى محمود (رحلتي من الشك إلى الإيمان)

"I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed it's beauty to them."
— Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
"
— Samuel Beckett

"You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been. "
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
— Sydney Smith

"The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray/Audio Cassettes)

"We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try."
— Ekaterina Sedia (The Alchemy Of Stone)

"He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!"
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)

"It is the bungled crime that brings remorse."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Love Among the Chickens)

"Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense."
— Massad F. Ayoob (In the Gravest Extreme Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection)

"It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister."
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)