The Regrets Quotes

“Most people don't notice most other people. Most people don't notice much of anything. Their lives fit them too snugly; noticing requires space.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“It’s like I can’t tell now who’s the ghost: him or me. I just sort of float through life but I’m totally apart from it, like there’s a glass between me and the world.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“For anyone stuck between this world and another; for anyone who struggles to stay here.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“I believe in free will, not in fate. But will doesn't operate in a vacuum. Sometimes other people's are stronger than yours, and your will has no grounds for resistance.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Perhaps this is, on some level, what every woman longs for: the chance to become the world for another person, to prove that she is a world.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“His loneliness was suffocating, a form of panic; it made him want to get married. In the end I decided to study abroad in England and ignore all of his emails, and that did the trick eventually.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Certain people belong so completely to a particular time and place that they stay preserved in your mind there, as though trapped in a snow globe.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Still I felt triumphant. I'd encountered someone who'd once had the power to destroy me, and I'd remained calm. Whatever happened next, I'd already won.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Every individual love story takes place within a larger fabric of desire, stretching out infinitely, pulled from every possible direction. When you think about it, it's miraculous that anyone sticks together at all.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Rachel was the quiet girl on the other side of the seminar table who almost never spoke in class but turned in these brief, brilliant, odd pieces of writing: nuggets of dialogue that seemed as though they’d been translated from a different language, perhaps a language spoken by aliens or fish; strange little fables set in alternate universes; eerie portraits of cracked domesticity that made you feel as though you’d never really seen certain objects before (a spatula, a crocheted tissue box cover, the gelatinous web of light cast by a fish tank in a dark room).”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“I don’t care, I kept wanting to scream. I know you’re concerned for my heart, but I’m not entirely sure I have one, not in the same way as other people. That hard little fist in my chest, it won’t ever completely unclench. So what if I tempt fate?”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“I’d dated unadvisably before—the long-distance architect, the married whiskey distiller, the homeless freegan, the philosopher who’d recently broken an eight-year vow of celibacy.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“On the other hand, I knew my myths, and they all said you could kill something by seeing it too clearly. Cupid and Psyche shared a perfect love, but only in the dark.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“We learned to sleep with a flannel sheet between us, for safety.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Like anything beautiful on the edge of nonexistence, he now seemed unbearably precious.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“I occasionally felt bad about this difference between us—about the way I reliably failed to inhabit a moment, instead hovering outside of it, catlike, waiting to isolate and pounce on a tellable detail.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“So our lives became source material for a novel that unfolded in real time, text message by text message. It was like that Joni Mitchell line—“Love is a story told to a friend; it’s secondhand.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Even now I always try to prolong the slow beginning moments, to conjure that lost discovery-channel feeling.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“in that moment, felt like an annoyingly selective interpretation of our encounter with law enforcement, of her role in bringing it about. Still, this was what we loved about Samira: her determination to insist on her version of the world.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“looked at him a lot. I touched him all over with the fingers of my eyes. Some men’s handsomeness is a trick of the light and cannot survive such probing, but he held up. His handsomeness was not detachable from him. It moved when he moved.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“In my defense: is there a form of love that’s not a welcome unraveling?”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Et tu, Todd? What kind of person quits smoking when his friend dies?”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Even the West African place, after serving turbaned locals for years, had adjusted its message: GOAT HEAD STEW! read the placard outside. IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS!”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“The wheelchair?” “Yes.” My mother hadn’t forgotten the word; she simply considered it indecent to speak aloud of misfortune (or sex, for that matter) and angled whenever possible for others to do it for her.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“It was as if the stone had bored a hole through me, which I would always be aware of and would never be able to fill.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“Yet I could still feel the black stone churning around inside me, as final as the period at the end of a sentence.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“But this new feeling begged the question: what was the world, anyway?”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“I feared that if my art ever made a name for me, that “name” would only smother me beneath the weight of myself; the whole point had always been disappearance.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“In the morning my pain was mostly just the ache of being in the world, enfleshed and aware;”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets

“We can only warn you that, should you ignore them, you are almost certain to incur regrets.”
― Amy Bonnaffons, The Regrets