William Rose Benet Quotes

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They're all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.

I will not comment on this question. But sometimes not answering tells the truth better than any answer would.

My head has got regrets, but I haven't.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

The greatest tragedy in life is that some prayers go unanswered as they go unasked.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

I wish my father had lived longer. He died when I was 18.

Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.

Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out.

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

In some ways, I've been left with this great 'idolic' image of my father, but there's a sense of absence, too. You miss his advice and, also, his getting to know the person I have become.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

'The Story of Us' is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were seated a few seats away from each other. I just wanted to say to him, 'Is this killing you? Because it's killing me.' But I didn't. Because I couldn't. Because we both had these silent shields up.

I am lonely. I clean up the house, put kids to bed and there I sit.

My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that's the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

I've never wanted to hear.

My beloved father passed away just two months after I told him I was going to start a company. Whenever I make progress in my career, I wish I could share the news with my father.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.