Josh Billings Quotes

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

No operatic star has yet died soon enough for me.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

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.

Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.

I never liked the men I loved and never loved the men I liked.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life's blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.

I can speak for everybody in saying we've all been through a breakup to where you didn't want it to be over.

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.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, "That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!" Will you say so, Heathcliff?

I've lost the one girl I found.

..all I left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I have to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.

It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last one she loved. And I knew I wasn’t. I knew it, and I hated her for it. I hated her for not caring about me. I hated her for leaving that night, and I hated myself , too, not only because I let her go but because if I had been enough for her, she wouldn’t have even wanted to leave. She would have just lain with me and talked and cried, and I would have listened and kissed at her tears as they pooled in her eyes.

You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

You can't fast-forward heartbreak, and you can't rewind love - and that's just one big bummer.

I do feel at a loss for not having a child of my own at times, very much so.

When something you love gets taken away, it hurts you.