Janet Fitch Quotes

Remorse is memory awake.

‎It has ever been my fate to give pain to those whose happiness I should have promoted.

For whose sake did you live, for whose sake did you die? Forgive me, baby, for what I didn't do.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

When my young men began the killing, my heart was hurt.

Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure; married in haste, we repent at leisure.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

Nobody feels any worse than I do about losing.

I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.

Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.

I know so many people who have tremendous regret in their life.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

Our lives are marked and shaped by our regrets. Things we all want to take back and can’t. In a perfect world, we would never hurt the ones we love or cause hurt to befall them. But the world isn’t perfect and neither are we.

O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.

MY REGRETS ARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE I COULDN’T SAVE—Marines, soldiers, my buddies. I still feel their loss. I still ache for my failure to protect them.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Regret is the most tiresome of companions.

I had a little sorrow, Born of a little sin.

I want to look back. To look over my shoulder and see the Stop sign with huge reflective letters, pleading with Hannah. Stop!

Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man, Could field or grove, could any spot of earth, Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witnessed,-render back an echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!

I wondered about the half-life of regret.

Remorse is the poison of life.

When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliation of every fault. We recollect a thousand endearments, which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed; and wish, vainly wish, for his return, not so much that we may receive as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood.