IAreBoon

“What’s it like, saving the world and everything?” “It gives me hope that one day, you’ll say you’re happy living in it”

if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth. And I’m sure this will upset

the divine order. I am a simple man. I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.

A hot stove and a wooden porch, bent under the weight of my people. I was born, and it only got worse

from there. In the dead chill of a doctor’s office, I am told what to cut back on and what to add more of.

None of this sounds like living. I sit in a running car under a bath of orange light and eat the fried chicken

that I promised my love I would stray from for the sake of my heart and its blood

labor. Still, there is something about the way a grease stain begins small and then tiptoes its way along

the fabric of my pants. Here, finally, a country worth living in. One that falls thick from whatever

it is we love so much that we can’t stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.

“There is regret. Always, there is regret.”

— Philip Larkin, “Love, We Must Part Now”

“Somehow the longing we speak of, the look on the young woman's face that reveals her desperation, the way my friend gives his sadness away like a crime he can't keep from talking about, somehow this is representative of the best in us,”

— Charlie Smith, “In Praise of Regret”

“You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”

— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“And now I’d only like to have what I would have been and never was.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice [...] What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy.”

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points,’ one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Someone once told me where a sentence enters us and it's the same place as regret.”

— Alex Dimitrov, “Time is a River”

“Did you know in the old tongues ‘regret’ means to ‘weep again’?”

— Frank LaRue Owen, “Savor”

“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 us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?”

— Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret,”

— Richard Jackson, “Benediction”

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”