Regret Is Always At The End Quotes

Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.

Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret?

She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now. ‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic dissappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.

always takes action. Wrongly or rightly; that is revealed later. But you should act, be brave, seize life by the scruff of the neck. Believe me, little one, you should only regret inactivity, indecisiveness, hesitation. You shouldn’t regret actions or decisions, even if they occasionally end in sadness and regret.

You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets? I feel like that now: tired of the Me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me... --"Buddha Boy

People always say in the end you only regret the choices you didn't make but I really think you also regret the choices you were foolish enough to make.

Choose the path that's right by you. Always. It may end in misery -a small price to pay. No amount of hardship compares to the emptiness of regret. Of never having lived at all.

And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow's sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, as tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week. So it is with guilt and regret, but also with a sense of inevitability, that he cheats on his promise to Harold.

No matterwhat he did to make Claire’s life better or show her he’d changed, these memories would always linger in the recesses of his mind. For the rest of his life, he’d know what he’d done. Tony hated himself for all of it—hell, he always had the end justifies the means argument, but even he didn’t believe that anymore. Not now. Not now that he knew Claire and loved Claire.

And it was pointless...to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you.

In the end, we always regret the choices we didn't make, the love we didn't accept & the dreams we didn't fight for.

Once you become aware of your impending death, you have to make a compromise in accepting the loss of the life you wish you could have led and the reality of your imminent death. Sure, there will always be regrets and broken dreams, but you have to go easy on yourself. Over the last few days, I’ve come to realise that there is certain beauty in those regrets, they are proof of having lived. Maybe I will regrets some of my decisions when the moment comes, but that’s ok, No matter how you slice it, life is full of regrets anyway. I was never able to be myself completely or live my life exactly how I wanted to, I am not even sure if I ever figure out what exactly being myself and living out my dreams really meant. So I guess I am going to die with all those failures and regrets, all those unfulfilled dreams, all the people I’ve never met, all the things I’ve never tasted and all the places I’ve never been. I am taking all that with me to my grave, and I am ok with that. In the end, I am satisfied with who I am and the life I’ve lived, I am just happy to have been here at all.

For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain. But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end? That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed. Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price. But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?

I’ve come close enough a few times to know there’s no good way to go. Some ways are better than others, of course, but however it happens, the end result will always be the same. I guess all you can do is try to be happy and make the most of your days, so when the time comes, the people you leave behind can rest happy knowing you lived your best life.

Sometimes, there is no reason. Sometimes you kill and you hate killing but you are a soldier through and through so you keep killing. Your friends die. Your lovers die. And what you have at the end of your life is not the surety that you did it for some grand reason, but the hard knowledge that something was taken from you and you also gave it away. And you know you will carry that weight with you always. For it is a regret that only death can relieve.

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

You're safe with me, Mira. And I'm safe with you." He kissed her again to prove it. And when the clock struck one - that lone, ominous tone hovering in the dark - they were still kissing. Her razor blade had snagged his shirt and nicked his chest, and they'd ended up lying in the grass, hidden inside a shadow, ignoring their names whenever someone called them. He traced her mouth again and again, like he still couldn't believe it was real. There would always be a part of him she couldn't know. A secret place where his heartbreak was stored, where lost innocence and regret filled the air like smoke. She had no desire to open that door ... but she didn't know if that would change one day. If the key would tempt her, if a fairy would manipulate her or she would just be curious. But she had to believe she could be strong enough to resist. That what she wanted - what they both wanted - mattered more than the path that had been laid out for them. She let her hand slip under his shirt to touch the heart mark on his back, and he brought her other hand to his lips, and kissed every finger he'd entrusted with the key. He was so much more than his curse, and she was so much more than the girl who could betray him. Together ... they could be anything.

Karou who had, a lifetime past, begun this story on a battlefield, when she knelt beside a dying angel and smiled. You could trace a line from the beach at Bullfinch, through everything that had happened since - lives ended and begun, wars won and lost, love and wishbones and rage and regret and deception and despair and always, somehow, hope - and end up right here, in this cave in the Adelphas Mountains, in this company.

No matter what I attempt, even if it’s the most simple of tasks, it always ends in failure. Unfortunately, I find that my life is one big regret after another. Yet, after all these years, I still don’t know when to give up. Is it my fault to keep trying when the results are always the same? Is it impossible for me to make things right? Even if I’d try to give up, I don’t think I could. It’s not in my nature to sumbit in the face of disappointment. In the end, I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment. I really am an idiot…

There’s a difference between a mistake and a regret. Everything up to this moment has made this moment. If you can change a mistake, then go out and do what you can to change it. If you can’t change it, there’s no use regretting it because it will just make you miserable. Live right now, even if that involves dealing with the consequences of your actions. Time travel always ends badly.

But be warned: regret will always follow. It is the price of aiming true. For sometimes, when we take the deadliest aim, we are nothing if not reckless.

In the end, we always regret the life we failed to live.

And you realize that you've finally grown up. That youth has finished. In its place you have knowledge, which you must carry. You must also learn to accept that death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept. From this moment on, you will always be conscious of what you are doing. And any future feeling, whether joy or grief or excitement or regret, will come now with an awareness of its own end - with shadows you never noticed in youth. Variation of feeling will become depth of feeling. And you will appreciate tiny things - and step with the confidence of someone overjoyed to know he is doomed.

Dear Future Daughter: 1) When you’re at some party, chain smoking on the roof with some strange girl with blue hair and exorbitant large dark eyes, ask her about her day. I promise you, you won’t regret it. Often times you’ll find the strangest of people have the most captivating of stories to tell. 2) Please, never mistake desire for love. Love will engulf your soul, whilst desire will emerge as acid, slowly making it’s way through your veins, gradually burning you from the inside out. 3) No one is going to fucking save you, anything you’ve read or heard otherwise is bullshit. 4) One day a boy is going to come along who’s touch feels like fire and who’s words taste like vanilla, when he leaves you, you will want to die. If you know anything at all, know that it is only temporary. 5) Your mental health comes before school baby, always. If its midnight, and you have an exam the next day but your hands have been shaking for the past hour and a half and you’re not so sure you want to be alive anymore, pull out that carton of Ben and Jerry’s and afterwards, go the fuck to bed. So what if you get a 68% on the exam the next day? You took care of yourself and at the end of the day that will always come before a high test score. To hell with anyone who tells you differently.

In the end, we always regret the choices we didn’t make, the love we didn’t accept and the dreams we didn’t fight for.’ I

In the end, we always regret the choices we didn’t make, the love we didn’t accept and the dreams we didn’t fight for.

The Dream by Mark Baker A man lay on his bed at the end of his life waiting to die. His dream came to pay his last respects and bid farewell to the man who had never used it. As it entered the room the man looked down in shame. "Why did you not realize me?" the dream asked. "Because I was afraid," the man said. "Afraid of what," said the dream. "I was afraid I would fail." "But haven't you failed by not attempting to use me?". "Yes I did, but I always thought there would be tomorrow." "You Fool!" said the dream" Did it never occur to you that there was only ever today? the moment that you are in right now? Do you think that now that death is here that you can put it off until tomorrow?". "No", said the man, a tear gently rolling down his cheek. The dream was softer now, because it knew that there were two types of pain, the pain of discipline and the pain of regret, and while discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs pounds. Then the dream leant forward to gently wipe away the tear and said, " You need only have taken the first step and I would have taken one to meet you, for the only thing that ever separated us was the belief in your mind that you couldn't have me". Then they said goodbye and they both died.

I’ll always have a piece of you,” he strokes my back in the soothing way I’ve missed for so long, “And you will always have a piece of me.” He pulls back and cradles my face in his hands. “But I can see it. You still haven’t let go. You have to let go so you can get your happiness too. You were never to blame. Never. And I know if Dominic could, he would tell you the same. It was his decision. And he loved you.” I nod and nod as he wipes my never-ending tears. “I regret a lot of shit from back then, a lot, but I don’t regret you. I loved you then and now, and I always will.

Only, in the end, you will realize. Among all the baggage you carried all your life, you didn't own most of them. And the remaining weren't as important as you always thought or expected it to be.

At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.

I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!

10 facts about abusive relationships (what i wish i'd known) 1. it's not always loud. it's not always obvious. the poison doesn't always hit you like a gunshot. sometimes, it seeps in quietly, slowly. sometimes, you don't even know it was ever there until months after. 2. love is not draining. love is not tiring. this is not how it is supposed to be. 3. apologies are like band-aids, when what you really need is stitches– they don't actually fix anything long-term. soon enough, you'll be bleeding again, but they will never give you what you really need. 4. this is not your fault. you did not turn them into this. this is how they are, how they've always been. you can't blame yourself. 5. there will be less good days than bad days but the good days will be so amazing that it will feel like everything is better than it actually is. your mind is playing tricks on itself and your heart is trying to convince itself that it made the right choice. 6. they do not love you. they can not love you. this is not love. 7. you're not wrong for wanting to run, so do it. listen to what your gut is telling you. 8. you will let them come back again and again before you realize that they only change long enough for you to let them in one more time. 9. it's okay to be selfish and leave. there is never any crime in putting yourself first. when they tell you otherwise, don't believe them. don't let them tear you down. they want to knock you off your feet so that they can keep you on the ground. 10. after, you will look back on this regretting all the chances given, all the time wasted. you will think about what you know now, and what you would do differently if given the chance. part of you will say that you would never have even given them the time of the day, but another part of you, the larger one, will say that even after everything, you wouldn't have changed a thing. and as much as it will bother you, eventually, you will realize that that is the part that is right. because as much as it hurts, as much as you wish you'd never felt that pain, it has taught you something. it has helped you grow. they brought you something that you would have never gotten from somebody else. at the end of the day, you will accept that even now, you wouldn't go about it differently at all.

To my lovely starling, Maybe there are magical words that will make you understand, but if so, I do not know them. Words are your domain. I've always been better with pictures. I fear you think I am a monster. It's true I've disrupted many graves. The way I see it, the dead are dead. If, after their death, we can learn things from the about the human form - things that will increase the sum of human knowledge and the possibilities of art - what harm is that? After death, new life, new beauty. How can that be wrong? My friends and I have made use of some of the bodies as models. some we sell to surgeons who study them with the hopes of learning something about the frail mechanisms of the human body. I don't know exactly what Dottor de Gradi does in his workshop on the Rialto, and I was as surprised as you were to stumble on it. He couldn't - he wouldn't tell me if your friend's body ended up there. But he did assure me all of his work is focused solely on extending human life. I won't lie. I did it for the money as well. Don Loredan is holding a private exhibition in his palazzo tomorrow. The entry fee was quite steep but two of my paintings were accepted. This could be the beginning for me. I could find my own patrons. I could be more than just a peasant. Tommaso's assistant. So yes; a little for money. But mostly I did for the art. I don't expect these words to change how you feel. I simply want you not to see me as a monster. I don't want to be a monster. Not anymore. Not after meeting you. I know that we disrupted you dear friend's body, and for that I am deeply regretful. But if we had not done so, if I had not lingered in the San Domenico churchyard after standing guard for my friends, you and I might never have met. Meeting you is one thing I will never regret. I hope you like the painting. Consider tit a wedding gift. How stupid of me to let my heart go. It was a lovely fantasy while it lasted, though, wasn't it? Yours, Falco

Colin was beginning to be afraid(...)of the future, of the possibility, suddenly glimpsed, that his life might end like this. Like most young people, he'd always assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that regret, waste, failure lay in wait for others, but not for him. Now(...)he realized, for the first time, that he was not exempt, that this, unless he took steps to avoid it, could happen to him.

Happy endings don’t always happen. In fairy tales, the hero and heroine go through obstacles and trials, but their happily ever after always comes. It’s kinda the whole point of the story. Real life doesn’t offer that same guarantee. Time passes and the pages turn, but there’s only obstacles and trials, followed by more obstacles and trials with no happily ever after in sight. Sometimes people never find their grand romance. Sometimes people lose their grand romance before their life is over, leaving them with regrets and heartache. And sometimes, people lose their lives.

He doesn't know now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold's claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won't even be conscious that he's doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won't, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.

Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough.

An enchantress always takes action. Wrongly or rightly; that is revealed later. But you should act, be brave, seize life by the scruff of the neck. Believe me, little one, you should only regret inactivity, indecisiveness, hesitation. You shouldn’t regret actions or decisions, even if they occasionally end in sadness and regret.

Jessilyn, ain't no man can't get someplace he never thought he'd get to. You let enough bad thoughts into your head, you can end up doin' all sorts of things you never thought possible. Otis let evil into his mind and it took over his heart. We best be on our guard and keep our minds on what's right and true so we don't become things we'll regret. His words scared me. I wanted to always be able to trust people, to know that good people stayed good people, but I was realizing all too quickly that the human heart is fragile and needs constant attention. I'd seen enough bleakness in my own heart to know my daddy was speaking the truth. That's why we all need to know Jesus in our hearts, Daddy said. Ain't no one else who can keep watch over our hearts like He can. Ain't no one else who can take the bad and replace it with good.

But stamped on her face was also regret that she had been wrong in her assessment. In those weeks she felt humiliated at having always ascribed a power to things that in the current hierarchies were insignificant: the alphabet, writing, books. Only then—I think today—did she, who seemed so disillusioned, so adult, come to the end of her childhood.

He doesn't know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold's claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won't even be conscious that he's doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won't, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.

At the end, I realise I was the only who always walked on the people, for nothing but betterment, and I got no regrets.

Silence is regret. Inaction will always translate to regret in the end. If you never say anything

To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. In myths, nothing good comes from gloating. You have to let the gods maintain the image of their singular power. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless. It is a reflex to expect the bad with the good. I don't know what fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don't know that my habits of pretending are only making us worse. Maybe moving forward also meant circling back. There are always two worlds. The one that I choose and the one that I deny, which inserts itself without my permission. To change our behavior, we must change our feelings and to change our feelings, we must change our thoughts. Freedom is bout choice - about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity and self-expression. To be free is to live in the present. When you have something to prove, you are not free. When we grieve, it's not just over what happened - we grieve for what didn't happen. You can't heal what you can't feel. It's easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our painful experiences aren't a liability, they are a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength. One of the proving grounds for our freedom is in how we relate to our loved ones. There is no forgiveness without rage. But to ask "why" is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can't control other people and we can't control the past. You can't change what happened, you can't change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.

I do, too! Just imagine, I’d have a private practice now, like Yenna. I wouldn’t have to sweat with novices. I wouldn’t have to wipe the noses of the blubbering ones or lock horns with the cheeky ones. Ciri, listen to me and learn. An enchantress always takes action. Wrongly or rightly; that is revealed later. But you should act, be brave, seize life by the scruff of the neck. Believe me, little one, you should only regret inactivity, indecisiveness, hesitation. You shouldn’t regret actions or decisions, even if they occasionally end in sadness and regret.

Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they’re obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture of Christian times is the sanctification of labour. You see, the early Christians were slaves, and it was necessary to show them that their obligatory toil was noble and virtuous. But when all is said and done, a man works to earn his bread and to keep his wife and children; it is a painful necessity, but there is nothing heroic in it. If people choose to put a higher value on the means than on the end, I can only pass with a shrug of the shoulders, and regret the paucity of their intelligence.

I learned a lesson that lives with me always. Death comes for all of us, and until it does, we have to do our fucking best to live. To live our lives to the fullest, to never regret. To love so deeply it could fill an ocean, to not let fear stop you from being who you want to be. Because if you don’t, if you let fear win, regret will eat you up and it will be all you have at the end.

Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter.

even the most dependable of men will stumble every now and then There are some people who insist that every time one door closes, another door opens, but this isn't always the case. There are doors that are meant to stay closed, ones that lead to rooms filled with serpents, rooms of regret, rooms that will lbind you if you dare to raise your eye to the keyhole in all innocence, simply to see what's inside Silence doesn't frighten us. We can just look at each other and recognize that there is pain in this world, even on beautiful nights when twilight settles in our backyards , sifting through the grass and the hedges you can't change what's means to be I had found if you didn't expect much, you weren't disappointed as much I'd simply have to live with the doubt hanging over me You could tell she didn't want to, she was trying with all her might to hold it back, but sometimes it's impossible to do that. I know from personal experience. You have to turn yourself cold as ice in order to stop yourself, and then if anything falls from your eyes it will only be blue ice crystals, hard and unbreakable as stone people who have faith were ao lucky, you didn't want to ruin anything for them. you didn't want to plant doubt where there was none. you had to treat such individuals tenderly and hope that some of whatever they were feeling rubs off on you everything is stupid when you really think about it. people get up everyday and they act like whatever they do is so important , but they're all just going to die in the end, so none of it matters.

Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke. And besides - who is to say what is the first and what is the final cause? -that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas... This is how we all survive. We default to the oldest scar. So I left the house with a howl of regret for all I had been denied, though there was nothing there I actually wanted. I wanted out of there, that was all. I wanted a larger life. My children are of a different breed. They seem to grow like plants, to be made of twig and blossom and not of meat. There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing, or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimes it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was...I try not to drink before half past five, but I always do drink - from the top of the wine bottle to the last, little drop. It is the only way I know to make the day end.

You’ll do,” Hemarchidas thought. “Isn’t this what we always end up with? What we truly want is unreachable, so we’ll make do with what is at hand. I know for you it’s different. I know for you it’s really me you want. You won’t regret it. I’ll love you for that, and for who you are. There is still a little part of me that wishes things could have been different. I’ll never let you know, feel, or even suspect that, though. I’ll make sure at least one of us gets what he truly wants.” He noticed Arranulf was studying his face. He gave him a reassuring smile and a light peck on the lips. “It’ll be all right, and I too will be all right.

The master was the light of her life. And I always says that the ones who quarrels takes the loss the hardest in the end. It's regrets, isn't it? All they didn't say or do. She'll feel it more than the rest, mark my words

Culturally, though not theologically, I’m a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don’t speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business. “Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them. “In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this—I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God

Ask yourself what you’re really trying to get from the other person in this interaction. Be honest. If it’s your parent, do you want your parent to listen to you? Understand you? Regret his or her behavior? Apologize to you? Make amends? If your goal involves empathy or a change of heart on your parent’s part, stop right there and come up with a different goal—one that’s specific and achievable. Remember, you can’t expect immature, emotionally phobic people to be different from how they are. However, you can set a specific goal for the interaction. Identify the specific outcome you want from each interaction and set it as a goal. Here are some examples: “I express myself to my mother even though I’m nervous.” “I tell my parents I’m not coming home for Christmas.” “I ask my father to talk nicely to my children.” Your goal might be just to express your feelings. This is achievable because you can ask others to listen, even though you can’t make them understand. Or your goal might be as simple as reaching an agreement about where the family will have Thanksgiving dinner. The key is to go into the interaction always knowing the end point you wish to arrive at.

No one paid much attention when he left. They continued to eat and drink and talk and laugh over their suffering, and occasionally run to the bathroom to be ill. It was this way more or less every night and every morning. Strangers appeared in his hotel room, always a wreck after the previous night. In the morning, they stuck themselves back together again. They rubbed at raccoon-eyed faces full of smeared makeup, looked for lost hats and feathers and beads and phone numbers and shoes and hours. It wasn't a bad life. It wouldn't last, but nothing ever did. They would all be like Alfie in the end, crying on his sofa at dawn and regretting it all. Which was why Magnus stayed away from those kinds of problems. Keep moving. Keep dancing.

My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.

This is the short drop,” the man said. “You’ll notice that, unlike the standard drop or the long drop, your neck is not broken. Which may seem like a blessing now, but in the end you will wish it had been a longer drop and a shorter wait. But that’s the good news and bad news of the short drop. You live longer, but . . . you live longer. Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter.

Tell yourself that there are things you will never forget. Tell yourself that you will always remember what is important. Tell yourself that everything you love will stay with you, forever. Even though it won't. Not even a little. Nothing lasts. But unless you are strong, and careful, that will not be enough. I learned love form sacrifice. I learned love from living. And no matter where I've gone, or what I've done, all the dark things I do not regret, but will never speak of, that is the one part of me that I have always kept safe. But that's not enough. It's not the length of a life that matters, just the depth of it. The chances we take. The pathes we choose. How we go on after our hearts break. Hearts always break. And so we bend with our hearts. And we sway. But in the end, what matters is that we loved and lived.

Maybe love is just hormones or endorphins—not some great force all around us. Maybe that’s just nonsense. It’s always seemed to me that love is about being found—the way you might find your missing cat because you knew he had a notch on his left ear and came to the sound of knew he had a notch on his left ear and came to the sound of pebbles rattling in a can. But maybe that isn’t the way things work. Maybe you can only be “found” for a little while. Just like Joseph and Isuza LaRonge discovered, “forever” isn’t really forever. Everything ends. Everything is lost eventually.

But he knew that time only moved evenly upon the hands of clocks: to men it can linger and almost stop dead, race on, leap chasms and linger again. He knew, with a little sadness, that it always made up its distance in the end. To-day it had travelled gropingly, like an engine in a fog, but now, with each passing hour of the holiday it would gather speed, and the days would flash by like little wayside stations. In a fortnight he would be sitting in this room on the last evening, thinking how the first night of the holiday seemed like yesterday—full of regrets at wasted time.…

If you least understand the essence of timely and courageously saying no to what you have to say no to, when you have to say no, you shall always say yes to what is due no remorsefully and count the cost of never saying no when you had to in pity though you shall know your ‘had I know’ in the end.

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.) It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

I thought to myself then that it didn't matter where I ended up; I'd always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I;d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn't. I'd never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you're happy about that. OR maybe you're not. Maybe you're carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I'm not. I'm just the one to tell it, at least my part in it- the story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It's an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise.

You are a writer—you write one chapter and go on to the next and the next and so forth. You manage the story, you control the ending, no one else. Think about it. The only difference between life and fiction is you cannot rewrite the beginning, but the ending is always within reach. While you write you think how the story will end. Do you make it an ending with no regrets?

She was a mimicry of a façade fashioned from the half-truths of her life. She was a beautiful abomination, patched together from the most pristine and terrible parts she could find. She was a black crystal of many cuts and facets whose dark glow suffocated and entranced those it washed over. There was a pointlessness in her eyes and apathy in her stature, and further in, past the symphonies of nightmarish screams was a blinding light. All the capability she could ever ask for kept in a place she would never reach. She chose the ice rather than the fire, shivering and hard with heat sparse, for while a flicker can exist in freeze's cold, it's heat will not radiate, no matter how bold. She took my face in hands that would make ice seem warm and whispered a blizzard into my ear, a cascading song of fear after fear. The lies she spilled, mixed with regrets and appeal, were cloaked in the inferno of her rage, the anger, the only thing that really made her real. This was her one semblance of life, a bottomless and endless void of proportions vast with a calamity of fusion and fission streaking through, a mindless hue, an emotion with a face, a darling of her race. The cracks spew darkness from within her ever so pale skin. They congregated on her curves and flesh in black and churning rivers and streams. They flooded every dip with blackness. They filled every hollow with unstable curiosity, this is her release, this is when she is free. The faces of deceit always laugh, they never wallow for their lies are a pleasure tool, her insides are contorted in laughter the same way, just as slick, just as cruel. A crude combination of fascination, of animation, of the darkest demons of them all. She was poetry written in pen, scratched and scribbled again and again. Ink splattered across the page, and within those scrawled words, those small, sharp incisions, an image can be seen, and you're left to wonder what, in the end, this all could mean...

Those who fly always first get out on the edge. If you want to seize an opportunity, you must take a risk. If you want to grow, you must make mistakes. If you want to reach your potential, you will have to take chances. If you don’t, you will be resigned to a life of mediocrity. The people who don’t make mistakes end up working for those who do. And in the end, they often end up regretting the safe life they lived. —

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly. Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest and, in the end, the truest. Like most of his life's writing, the play was concerned with love. and as in his life, so in his writing: love did not work. Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness, there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. Such was love's nature. Of course, it "worked" in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as spring linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel. It stirred him from well-mannered timidity to relative boldness, through a rather theoretical boldness, one tragi-comically incapable of action. It taught him the gulping folly of anticipation, the wretchedness of failure, the whine of regret and the silly fondness of remembrance. In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster when you give yourself over to it entirely. But all love needs a journey. all love symbolically is a journey and that journey needs bodying forth. Madame Amelie briefly wondered if this was a philosophical truth or an empty platitude.

He will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better.

ON THE A TRAIN There were no seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole at the end of one of the seats and I was reading the beauty column of the Journal-American, which the man next to me was holding up in front of him. All of a sudden I felt a tap on my arm, and I looked down and there was a man beginning to stand up from the seat where he was sitting. "Would you like to sit down?" he said. Well, I said the first thing that came into my head, I was so surprised and pleased to be offered a seat in the subway. "Oh, thank you very much," I said, "but I am getting out at the next station." He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I'll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it out as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said, "I just remembered this isn't my station after all." Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said, "But I still don't want to sit down, because I'm getting off at the next station." I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. He was one of those small, rather glum or sad men who always look off into the distance after they have finished what they are saying, when they speak. I felt quite proud of my strong-mindedness at not getting off the train and missing my bus simply because of the fear of a little embarrassment, but just as the train was shutting its doors I peered out and there it was, 168th Street. "Oh dear!" I said. "That was my station and now I have missed the bus!" I was fit to be fled, and I had spoken quite loudly, and I felt extremely foolish, and I looked down, and the man who had offered me his seat was partly looking at me, and I said, "Now, isn't that silly? That was my station. A Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street is where I'm supposed to get off." I couldn't help laughing, it was all so awful, and he looked away, and the train fidgeted along to the next station, and I got off as quickly as I possibly could and tore over to the downtown platform and got a local to 168th, but of course I had missed my bus by a minute, or maybe two minutes. I felt very much at a loose end wandering around 168th Street, and I finally went into a rudely appointed but friendly bar and had a martini, warm but very soothing, which cost me only fifty cents. While I was sipping it, trying to make it last to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn't have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering me his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.

father. To Britt Arthurs, If you’re reading this, then Kay and the others have successfully found you. I regret that I cannot come with them, for more than anything I would like to be there for you. I would love to see what you do and the new goals you accomplish! But I am needed here, in this time. And as much as I would wish it, my place is not with you in the future. But that does not change how proud I am of you, or how much I love you. Camelot is strong, and Britain is great because of your court and because of you. I know you can do it again, in your time. Though it is a different situation, I know you will continue to do many great things, and you will change the world for the better. So please, Britt. Remember me, and know that I love you, and I will always think of you with a parent’s pride and joy. You will ever be my Britt, my daughter, and my King. With all my love, Your father It took Britt several minutes before she could stop crying.

Don’t you dare rest easy And leave the rest of it to me I want you to feel heavy Regret me Regret setting me free Regret me I won’t go easily Regret it Regret saying no Regret it Regret letting me go One day, you’ll regret it I’ll make sure of it before I go MIDNIGHTS Don’t remember many midnights Forgotten some of my best insights Can’t recall some of the highest heights But I’ve memorized you Don’t remember many daybreaks How many sunrises have come as I lay awake Don’t dwell on my worst mistakes But I always think of you You’re the thing that’s crystal clear The only thing that I hold dear I live and die by if you’re near All other memories disappear Without you Without you Don’t remember how I was then Can’t keep straight where I was when What is my name, where have I been Where did I start, where does it end You’re the thing that’s crystal clear The only thing that I hold dear I live and die by if you’re near All other memories disappear Without you Without you

A courtroom could mean only one thing. The Occupation of Naboo had ended, but it was going to follow her forever. She couldn’t regret it. She had done what she needed to do. But she was just so tired. Sabé knelt in front of her and took her hands. Padmé knew that her dearest friend would see her weariness no matter how she tried to hide it, so she didn’t. Sabé looked her straight in the face, as she had always done, and the message in her eyes was clear as crystal. We are brave, Your Highness.

Look ahead It’s tempting to go through life looking in the rearview mirror. When you are always looking back, you become focused on what didn’t work out, on who hurt you, and on the mistakes you’ve made, such as: “If only I would have finished college.” “If only I’d spent more time with my children.” “If only I’d been raised in a better environment.” As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now. Whether it happened twenty minutes ago or twenty years ago, let go of the hurts and failures and move forward. If you keep bringing the negative baggage from yesterday into today, your future will be poisoned. You can’t change what’s happened to you. You may have had an unfair past, but you don’t have to have an unfair future. You may have had a rough start, but it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. Don’t let a hurtful relationship sour your life. Don’t let a bad break, a betrayal, a divorce, or a bad childhood cause you to settle for less in life. Move forward and God will pay you back. Move forward and God will vindicate you. Move forward and you’ll come into a new beginning. Nothing that’s happened to you is a surprise to God. The loss of a loved one didn’t catch God off guard. God’s plan for your life did not end just because your business didn’t make it, or a relationship failed, or you had a difficult child. Here’s the question: Will you become stuck and bitter, fall into self-pity, blame others, and let the past poison your future? Or will you shake it off and move forward, knowing your best days are still ahead? The next time you are in your car, notice that there’s a big windshield in the front and a very small rearview mirror. The reason the front windshield is so big and the rearview mirror is so small is that what’s happened in the past is not nearly as important as what is in your future. Where you’re going is a lot more important than where you’ve been.

He ended his address by saying, “We are all of us marred and scarred and imperfect. We make mistakes. We do things we deeply regret. We are tempted and sometimes we give in to that temptation. Not because we’re bad or weak, but because we’re human. We are a crowd of faults. But know this.” He stood in complete silence for a moment, the huge auditorium motionless. “There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know.” He paused again. “I need help. Those are the signposts. The cardinal directions.

meeting and falling in love with you, wasn't a mistake , but its something i regret ever doing again, its not your fault my love , i just cant deal with all your lovers , i feel used, i knew that you would never love me , but still, i loved you more then everyone else did, but you didn't love me... were still young , but i always want to be next to you , i always crave your touch , i'm sorry if sometimes i'm annoying sometimes, i just cant help but love you, and i promise i won't ever let you down, because in the end , all i wanted was you, and to be loved by you :) .

Always with the queer regret, blurring all the other summers into a fine nostalgic brew - distilling all the tart sweetnesses into this one, with the sea of music skipping over the time, and the feeling in you very warm and it is our town, we all together, very sweet, all summer light, sometimes almost tearful because it is so moving all the time. The fluid color, the fluid sound, towards its ending... And now I am sitting here crying almost because suddenly I am knowing in my head and feeling in my guts what those words mean when I did not know the full impact of them in the beginning, but merely their mystic beauty.

Letter Six To The One Who Left Too Soon Do you regret it? Does it hurt when you see my pictures? Does it hurt when you read my words? Do you wonder if my poems are about you? Do you sometimes write a long message to apologize, then delete it? Was it me? Was it you? Was it timing? Was I too hard to love? Were you too scared of loving again? It’s hard for me to believe that you’re a bad person because you were so kind to me. It’s hard for me to believe that it was all fake because it felt genuine. It’s hard for me to believe that you had that connection with everyone because I didn’t feel like you were pretending. I didn’t feel like you were acting. Was it so hard to ask me on a few more dates? Was it so hard to ask me a few more personal questions? Was it so hard to text me back to keep the conversation going? Was it so hard to like me? Why am I always the one who’s ready? The one who’s willing to stay, the one who’s willing to try against all odds and the only one who’s willing to fight? Why am I always the one dreaming and you’re the one waking me up? Why does it begin with smiles and end with tears? Why does it always have to be you against me? Why can’t it be us against the world? I hope one day you tell me why you left too soon. I hope one day you tell me the real reason. I hope one day you tell me the truth. Sometimes I wonder about you. What you’re doing, who you’re with, why you picked her and if you ever think about me. Sometimes I wonder if you will ever reach out, just to say you miss me, say sorry or just to hear my voice. And sometimes I wish you had stayed. I hope you learn how to stay. I hope you stop leaving. I hope you learn that staying is the only way to open your heart and stop running. I hope you learn that some people—like me—would’ve done anything for you to stay. I hope you learn that there’s so much more value in staying than leaving. I hope you learn that staying doesn’t always hurt.

She was on her second cup when a soft, womanly voice sighed in her ear. “Good morning, Tessie.” It was her brother-in-law, Father Michael Antoniou. “Hi, Father Mike. Beautiful service today,” Tessie said, and immediately regretted it. Father Mike was the assistant priest at Assumption. When the last priest had left, harangued back to Athens after a mere three months, the family had hoped that Father Mike might be promoted. But in the end another new, foreign-born priest, Father Gregorios, had been given the post. Aunt Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne’s voice, “My husband. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.

The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: Yours etc. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: Yours &c. Yours &c. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say ‘Yours, etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss ffffffolkes.’ But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote Yours, etc, just as she heard it and The Times reckoned the OB captain a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to &c., whereupon other OBs followed the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it: Yours &c. Whereupon, as an ardent damp-ear of sixteen, I took to the parodic sign-off: Love, &c. Not all my correspondents unfailingly seized the reference, I regret to say. One demoiselle hastened her own de-accessioning from the museum of my heart by informing me with hauteur that use of the word etc., whether in oral communication or in carven prose, was common and vulgar. To which I replied, first, that ‘the word’ et cetera was not one but two words, and that the only common and vulgar thing about my letter - given the identity of its recipient - was affixing to it the word that preceded etc. Alack, she didn’t respond to this observation with the Buddhistic serenity one might have hoped. Love, etc. The proposition is simple. The world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that anything else - everything else - is merely an etc.; and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the etc. of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration. This is the only division between people that counts.

Sometimes, when you think about it years later, you wish you could retrieve the words certain people said and the people themselves, so as to ask them what they were trying to tell you … But they’re as gone as gone can be! … We weren’t educated enough to understand them … We’d like to know if maybe they’ve changed their minds … But it’s much too late … It’s over and done! … Nobody knows anything about them anymore. So we just have to go on alone in the night. We’ve lost our true companions, and we didn’t even ask them the right question, the real one, when there was still time. When we were with them, we didn’t know. Lost men. Anyway, we’re always late. Vain regrets won’t make the kettle boil.

I’m waiting until the divorce is official. I’ve never gone back on my word or my vows, even with someone who didn’t deserve it. I’d want that person I end up with to know they don’t ever have to doubt me.” I already hated this imaginary person. With a passion. I was going to pull the plug out of her tires. His next words didn’t make me like his imaginary next wife any more either. “I always figured I’d grow old with someone, so I need to make the next one count since it’s for keeps.” My heart started acting weird next. And he kept going, signing her death warrant without even knowing it. “She wouldn’t be my first, but she’d be the only one who ever mattered. I think she could wait for the time to be right. I’d make sure she never regretted it.

… A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths , I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me. But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true. At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become. If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is as its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves. Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those from which we suffer, but not those which please us. To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better.

The next time you start regretting something you did, something you said, that life-changing choice you made—please remember that you did the best you could. You made the decision you felt was best for you at the time. And even though the outcome you desired turned into something completely different; maybe you were always meant to be exactly where you are right now. Maybe that relationship was supposed to end, even though you didn’t want it to. Maybe some things fall apart so that something else more beautiful can come together. Maybe even though it doesn’t feel like it right now, this—this small yet giant, mighty yet magic little moment—was always where you were supposed to end up. So don’t wistfully wish for what could have been. You did the best you could, the best way you knew how. You were meant to be here.

He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.

An enigmatic lack of curiosity about the future that prevented him from enjoying the present. But what someone else feels always belongs to the world of the imagination. You never know for certain, What we begin with reluctance or even with a sense of repulsion, can end up drawing us in by sheer force of habit or an unexpected taste for repetition. You would need to have lost an awful lot before you’d be willing to renounce what you have, especially if what you have is part of a long-term plan, part of a decision that contained a large dose of obstinacy. The desire to know is a curse and the greatest source of misfortune; The Buenos Aires accent, at least to Spanish ears, does always tend to sound like a caricature of itself. There’s nothing like curiosity and comedy to distract us—if only for an instant—from our sorrows and anxieties. What at first repels can end up attracting, after a swift moment of adjustment or approval, once you’ve made up your mind. The greater your grief or shock, the greater your state of desolation and numbness and abandonment, the lower your defenses and the fewer your qualms; professional seducers know this well and are always on the lookout for misfortunes. Even when things are happening and are present, they, too, require the imagination, because it’s the only thing that highlights certain events and teaches us to distinguish, while they are happening, the memorable from the unmemorable. Going back is the very worst infidelity. When something comes to an end, even the something you most want to end, you suddenly regret that ending and begin to miss it. You never stop feeling intimidated by someone who intimidated you from the outset. Not being able to choose isn’t an affront, it’s standard practice. It is in most countries, as it is in ours, despite the collective illusion.

... They'll applaud me for doing what Windsors always do. Putting family first. I strongly advise you to beg my wife for forgiveness. If you don't do it by the end of the day, I'll take every single thing that you left her for and I'll drive it into the fucking ground. I'll make you regret the day you left her waiting for you at school, filled with faith that you'd be there. You broke her heart in irreparable ways, and I won't stop until you feel the way she once did: despaired and abandoned. There will always be a price to pay for bringing tears to my wife's eyes, Miguel. I'll make you pay for every single one of them if it's the last fucking thing I do." In many ways the words I just spoke to Miguel truly will start a war. The media coverage will be a blood bath and his company is about to become the biggest casualty. I can't bring myself to regret it though. Valentina deserves this much. She might not ask for it, but she deserves revenge, no matter the cost.

Pull out a match and light up a million notes and a million words, consume the energy on papers like its fuel, and all the long lost feelings are your coal. Set the whole thing on fire and never look back, an expert on regrets and mistakes, tell the story as easy as a philosophical theory; devils disguised as angels, angels turning into devils, and the perfectionist in between always stuck in the middle. Tired and hurt, but angry till I burn, watching a sinner blaming life and life taking his side still, anyway I took my advice and kept the things I loved from day one aside, so I'm not alone and love is also taking my side. Save the date, it's 365 days in training, and we finally reached the end of our magical tragic failure and if you are smart then it's not a surprise; you know that my sky is not raining. Take out a match and burn this house down, it took me two seconds to figure out that I deserve solid better-looking ground. So let me feel the heat in my brain blow out and my heart beating in its place safe and sound inside.

I didn’t realize how far back I’d have to go in order to tell you about John Coffey, or how long I’d have to leave him there in his cell, a man so huge his feet didn’t just stick off the end of his bunk but hung down all the way to the floor. I don’t want you to forget him, all right? I want you to see him there, looking up at the ceiling of his cell, weeping his silent tears, or putting his arms over his face. I want you to hear him, his sighs that trembled like sobs, his occasional watery groan. These weren’t the sounds of agony and regret we sometimes heard on E Block, sharp cries with splinters of remorse in them; like his wet eyes, they were somehow removed from the pain we were used to dealing with. In a way—I know how crazy this will sound, of course I do, but there is no sense in writing something as long as this if you can’t say what feels true to your heart—in a way it was as if it was sorrow for the whole world he felt, something too big ever to be completely eased. Sometimes I sat and talked to him, as I did with all of them—talking was our biggest, most important job, as I believe I have said—and I tried to comfort him. I don’t feel that I ever did, and part of my heart was glad he was suffering, you know. Felt he deserved to suffer. I even thought sometimes of calling the governor (or getting Percy to do it—hell, he was Percy’s damn uncle, not mine) and asking for a stay of execution. We shouldn’t burn him yet, I’d say. It’s still hurting him too much, biting into him too much, twisting in his guts like a nice sharp stick. Give him another ninety days, your honor, sir. Let him go on doing to himself what we can’t do to him. It’s that John Coffey I’d have you keep to one side of your mind while I finish catching up to where I started—that John Coffey lying on his bunk, that John Coffey who was afraid of the dark perhaps with good reason, for in the dark might not two shapes with blonde curls—no longer little girls but avenging harpies—be waiting for him? That John Coffey whose eyes were always streaming tears, like blood from a wound that can never heal.

Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we've been told it's our right (obligation in fact) to try to fulfill them. In an end-of-the-millennium essay, the historian J.M. Roberts wrote: "The 20th century has spread as never before the idea that human happiness is realizable on Earth." That's a wonderful thing, of course, but not always a realistic goal, and when reality falls short of expectations, we often blame ourselves. "Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken," writes the British psychoanalyst Adam Philips in his 2012 collection of essays, 'Missing Out'. "The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do." Even if our dreams were never realizable, even if they were false from the start, we regret not pursuing them. "We can't imagine our lives," writes Phillips, "without the unlived lives they contain.

All I can offer is this (without a single remembrance or image, or even incoherent wisp of correspondence), even so I knew, in those eradicated moments, and I know still: That there, there outside the gates of any physical state or world we may inhabit, something is—which, being so unlike, so beautiful and radiant and eternal—can never be transported into living life, not even by a word. Brighter than fires, more soft than fur, better than the best—nameless, non-communicable, absolute. And, without a bookmark in our hearts or brains to enable us to find it while here, yet there—there it nevertheless is, and will be ever. There is nothing to fear or to regret. There is no end. Only always a Beginning—that not even the most lucid scripture, or most transcendent art (even that of the Scarlet Lily, Cremisia Ranaldi) can recreate. We touch upon it, yes, I believe we do, in our greatest poets (which is why, if only as a ghost, she could undo the door). In the best of love or joy, that too—but all of this is a shadow. The shadow of the Nothing which is Everything.

What if every dream you ever dreamt was a part of a dream that you're living? To my Smiling Soul, If there is one thing I have learnt over Time that stands solid and can pass the test of Time in every Universe then that is the Strength of our Soul when we live through the Smile of our Heart. It doesn't matter, how much time goes by, how many detours or losses fell on your path, as long as you stand your ground, as long as you don't let regret or failure to get the better of you, you win, you walk with slow but steady steps knowing there is someone watching over you, holding onto integrity and grace. You remember to bury your pain, your loss, your sorrow and plant a seed of Love instead with a Hope that someday, Somewhere in some corner of this Universe you will find your due, something that only He alone can give you, something that is yours, entirely yours. Until then, keep reminding the world that a Unicorn doesn't need to be a lion or a wolf in the wilderness of Life. - your Smiling Dream To every Dreamer, keep weaving that halo of dream for you never know where you might end up in the Smile of Time, because Life knows exactly the Dream that Life weaves around us. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

Ö  Lack of Urgency Arguably the single most significant cause of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential, which prevents 95% of our society from creating and living the life they truly want, is that most people have no sense of urgency to improve themselves so they can improve their lives. Human nature is to live with a “someday” mindset and think life will work itself out. How’s that working out for everybody?   This someday mindset is perpetual, and it leads to a life of procrastination, unfulfilled potential and regret. You wake up one day and wonder what the heck happened; how did your life end up like this? How did you end up like this?   One of the saddest things in life is to live with regret, knowing that you could have, be, and do so much more.   Remember this truth:  now matters more than any other time in your life, because it’s what you are doing today that is determining who you’re becoming, and who you’re becoming will always determine the quality and direction of your life.   If you don’t make the commitment today to start becoming the person you need to be to create the extraordinary life you really want, what makes you think tomorrow—or next week, or next month, or next year—are going to be any different?  They won’t. And that’s why you must draw your line in the sand.

Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.” Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.” (...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?” Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.” Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.” “This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus. “Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.” Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.” Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.” “Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.” Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.

The silence awed me. I no longer suffered. My friends attended to me in silence. The job was finished, and my conscience was clear. Gathering together the last shreds of energy, in one last long prayer, I implored death to come and deliver me. I had lost the will to live, and I was giving up—the ultimate humiliation for a man, who, up till then, had always taken a pride in himself. This was no time for questions nor for regrets. I looked death straight in the face, besought it with all my strength. Then abruptly I had a vision of the life of men. Those who are leaving it for ever are never alone. Resting against the mountain, which was watching over me, I discovered horizons I had never seen. There at my feet, on those vast plains, millions of beings were following a destiny they had not chosen. There is a supernatural power in those close to death. Strange intuitions identify one with the whole world. The mountain spoke with the wind as it whistled over the ridges or ruffled the foliage. All would end well. I should remain there, forever, beneath a few stones and a cross. They had given me my ice-axe. The breeze was gentle and sweetly scented. My friends departed, knowing that I was now safe. I watched them go their way with slow, sad steps. The procession withdrew along the narrow path. They would regain the plains and the wide horizons. For me, silence.

Even here, it is only the evening that I love. The dawn gladdens me for a moment; I fancy I could fell the charm of it if the day that is to follow were not bound to be so long! I certainly have a free domain to wander in, but it is not wild and impressive enough. its features are tame, its rocks small and uninteresting, the vegetation as a rule lacks the luxuriance and profusion I like to see; one never catches here the murmur of a torrent far down in the depths; it is a land of plains. Nothing burdens me here; nothing satisfies me. I fancy, if anything, my boredom increases; simply because I have not enough to suffer. I am happier then, you think? Not a bit of it; to suffer and to be unhappy are not at all the same thing, no more than enjoyment is identical with happiness. I am delightfully circumstanced, and yet I live a melancholy life. I could not be better off than I am here: free, undistracted, well in health, unyoked from business, unconcerned about a future from which I expect nothing, and leaving behind without regret a past I have not enjoyed. But here is within me a persistent unrest, a yearning I cannot define, imperative and absorbing, which takes me out of the sphere of perishable creatures... No, it is not the yearning to love; you are mistaken there, as I once was mistaken myself. The interval is wide enough between the emptiness of my heart and the love it has so eagerly desired, but the distance between what I am and what I want to be is infinite. I do not want to enjoy possession; I want hope, I should like to know. I need limitless illusions, receding before me to keep me always under their spell. What use to me is anything that can end? The hour which will arrive in sixty years' time is already close at hand. I have no liking for anything that takes its rise, draws near, arrives and is no more. I want a good, a dream, in fact a hope that is ever in advance, ever beyond me, greater than my expectation itself, greater than the things which pass away. I would like to be pure intelligence, I would like the eternal order of the world... And yet, thirty years ago, that order was, and I had no existence. worthless and accidental creature of a day, I used not to exist, and soon I shall exist no more. I discover with surprise that my thought is greater than my being, and when I consider that my life is absurd in my own eyes, I lose my way in hopeless darkness. Truly, happier is he who fells trees and burns charcoal, and flies to holy water when the thunder peals. He lives like the brute. Nay; for he sings at his work. I shall never know his peace, and yet I shall pass like him. His life will glide along with time, but mine is led astray and hurried on by excitement and unrest, and by the phantoms of an unknown greatness.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

She hadn’t lived since her childhood either. Why had she not contracted the mark back then and died with her mother? If this was to be the end, it should have come sooner. It might have spared her years of misery and loneliness. And she was so very alone. As she lay staring at the raftered ceiling, she knew more keenly than ever how alone she was. The rest of the staff, tucked safely away inside the inn or the stable loft, slept peacefully oblivious to her midnight turmoil. No one would come looking for her. No one would care when she died. In an instant, her panting breaths twisted into feeble laughter. She was alone, just as she always had been, and fighting against things she had no power to overcome. Everything had changed, but nothing had changed at all. The laughter grew in strength until she gasped, on the verge of hysterics. It didn’t matter whether she was alone or surrounded by scores of friends and loved ones. She would die either way. That naked truth infused her with a blissful, ludicrous peace. Death was the one constant of the deathmark, the one thing she could count on. For Nell, who had lived her whole life trying to protect herself, who had never been able to count on anyone or anything, that realization was most liberating. She would die. But she wasn’t dead yet. The events of her life fluttered through her mind—her distant, naïve childhood, the bleak orphanage, the years at Baker’s Inn. She had wasted time catering to fear. She had been timid, docile, no better than a mule. She had done everything in her power to protect herself from ridicule and punishment, but where had that caution brought her? Sentenced to death, with a million regrets piled on her shoulders. “No more.” She forced those words through her lips, determination etched between her brows. “I will fear no more.” Spoken aloud, the oath seemed binding. Death would come—she had no power to stop it—but until the day it collected her, she would live as she saw fit.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was admired by all, but no one dared to ask for her hand in marriage. In despair, the king consulted the god Apollo. He told him that Psyche should be dressed in mourning and left alone on top of a mountain. Before daybreak, a serpent would come to meet and marry her. The king obeyed, and all night the princess waited for her husband to appear, deathly afraid and freezing cold. Finally, she slept. When she awoke, she found herself crowned a queen in a beautiful palace. Every night her husband came to her and they made love, but he had imposed one condition: Psyche could have all she desired, but she had to trust him completely and could never see his face.” How awful, I think, but I don’t dare interrupt him. “The young woman lived happily for a long time. She had comfort, affection, joy, and she was in love with the man who visited her every night. However, occasionally she was afraid that she was married to a hideous serpent. Early one morning, while her husband slept, she lit a lantern and saw Eros, a man of incredible beauty, lying by her side. The light woke him, and seeing that the woman he loved was unable to fulfill his one request, Eros vanished. Desperate to get her lover back, Psyche submitted to a series of tasks given to her by Aphrodite, Eros’s mother. Needless to say, her mother-in-law was incredibly jealous of Psyche’s beauty and she did everything she could to thwart the couple’s reconciliation. In one of the tasks, Psyche opened a box that makes her fall into a deep sleep.” I grow anxious to find out how the story will end. “Eros was also in love and regretted not having been more lenient toward his wife. He managed to enter the castle and wake her with the tip of his arrow. ‘You nearly died because of your curiosity,’ he told her. ‘You sought security in knowledge and destroyed our relationship.’ But in love, nothing is destroyed forever. Imbued with this conviction, they go to Zeus, the god of gods, and beg that their union never be undone. Zeus passionately pleaded the cause of the lovers with strong arguments and threats until he gained Aphrodite’s support. From that day on, Psyche (our unconscious, but logical, side) and Eros (love) were together forever.” I pour another glass of wine. I rest my head on his shoulder. “Those who cannot accept this, and who always try to find an explanation for magical and mysterious human relationships, will miss the best part of life.

He ought to be more clever in his murder attempt. Done properly, he could make a wealthy widow of you, and then you’d both have your happy ending.” Harry knew instantly that he shouldn’t have said it—the comment was the kind of cold-blooded sarcasm he had always resorted to when he felt the need to defend himself. He regretted it even before he saw Merripen out of the periphery of his vision. The Rom was giving him a warning shake of his head and drawing a finger across his throat. Poppy was red faced, her brows drawn in a scowl. “What a dreadful thing to say!” Harry cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said brusquely. “I was joking. It was in poor—” He ducked as something came flying at him. “What the devil—” She had thrown something at him, a cushion. “I don’t want to be a widow, I don’t want Michael Bayning, and I don’t want you to joke about such things, you tactless clodpole!” As all three of them stared at her openmouthed, Poppy leapt up and stalked away, her hands drawn into fists. Bewildered by the immediate force of her fury—it was like being stung by a butterfly—Harry stared after her dumbly. After a moment, he asked the first coherent thought that came to him. “Did she just say she doesn’t want Bayning?” “Yes,” Win said, a smile hovering on her lips. “That’s what she said. Go after her, Harry.” Every cell in Harry’s body longed to comply. Except that he had the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff, with one ill-chosen word likely to send him over. He gave Poppy’s sister a desperate glance. “What should I say?” “Be honest with her about your feelings,” Win suggested. A frown settled on Harry’s face as he considered that. “What’s my second option?” “I’ll handle this,” Merripen told Win before she could reply. Standing, he slung a great arm across Harry’s shoulders and walked him to the side of the terrace. Poppy’s furious form could be seen in the distance. She was walking down the drive to the caretaker’s house, her skirts and shoes kicking up tiny dust storms. Merripen spoke in a low, not unsympathetic tone, as if compelled to guide a hapless fellow male away from danger. “Take my advice, gadjo . . . never argue with a woman when she’s in this state. Tell her you were wrong and you’re sorry as hell. And promise never to do it again.” “I’m still not exactly certain what I did,” Harry said. “That doesn’t matter. Apologize anyway.” Merripen paused and added in whisper, “And whenever your wife is angry . . . for God’s sake, don’t try logic.” “I heard that,” Win said from the chaise.

Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.

Then he made the mistake of looking into her eyes and froze. Her expression was so open, so full of tenderness and longing as well as heat that he almost balked. This was supposed to be about closure, about having the goodbye they’d never gotten last time. How was he supposed to leave after if she gave herself to him this completely? Her hand came up to cradle the side of his face, her thumb stroking back and forth across his jaw, her touch gentle and loving. “Need you,” she murmured, It was good. Even better than he remembered. Liam buried his face in the side of her neck and sucked in a breath, struggling to hang on. Being cradled in Honor’s arms, buried to the hilt inside her while she opened her body and heart to him was the most incredible thing in the world. How the f*&^ was he going to walk away later? Without warning his eyes began to sting. As though she sensed how close he was to coming unglued, Honor murmured to him and pressed kisses to the side of his face, her hand urging his head to turn toward her. Liam shook his head, unable to bear that final level of intimacy when he knew this was their last time. Keeping his face in her neck he fought back the swell of emotion and began to move, a slow, shallow rocking motion that was more profound than words could ever be. He loved her. Would always love her, but it wasn’t enough because some things couldn’t be undone and he just couldn’t let her in the way he had before. All they had left was this bittersweet farewell, and he was going to make it memorable. .... A lump settled in his throat and he squeezed his eyes shut, torn between the excruciating pleasure swelling inside him and the need to see her face as he took her this last time. In the end, his heart won out. Powerless to stop himself, he lifted his head and looked down at her. Anguish sliced through his chest when he saw the tears glistening in her beautiful eyes. Don’t. Don’t cry. Shit, he didn’t want either of them to hurt anymore. He was sick of hurting. That’s why he was ending it all tonight. With a low sound of regret he covered her mouth with his, his tongue sliding against hers as he took her. Honor kissed him back deep and slow... Cupping her cheek with his free hand he gave her everything he had left to give, allowing his emotional shields to drop for these final moments. She ran her fingertips up and down his back in a soothing motion, her body limp and pliant beneath his, legs still wrapped around him. And all of a sudden he felt like crying. He felt too much, was in too deep again. He didn’t know what to say to make this any easier. After what they’d just shared he was more conflicted than ever about what to do. “I’ll miss you,” she murmured, and he caught the slight catch in her voice. Ah, fu&%. He gritted his teeth. It would be so much easier if they could just hate each other. For a moment he considered saying something to make her do exactly that, but couldn’t. Even he wasn’t enough of an a**hole to end things that way. And that look on her face… Against his better judgment, Liam sat back down on the edge of the bed and pulled her into his arms. Honor went willingly into his embrace, pressing her face to his chest as she hugged him tight in return. “I’ll miss you too.” Dammit, he should never have come here tonight. “I wish it could be different, but I just… I can’t do this anymore.” I’ll always love you but I can’t afford to let you back in again. “I’m sorry.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

Look at that ship. That clipper cost me a queen’s ransom, even with the Kestrel thrown in the bargain. But it was the fastest ship to be had.” He took her hands in his. “Forget money. Forget society. Forget expectations. We’ve no talent for following rules, remember? We have to follow our hearts. You taught me that.” He gathered her to him, drawing her hands to his chest. “God, sweet, don’t you know? You’ve had my heart in your pocket since the day we met. Following my heart means following you. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth if I have to.” He shot an amused glance at the captain. “Though I’d expect your good captain would prefer I didn’t. In fact, I think he’d gladly marry us today, just to be rid of me.” “Today? But we couldn’t.” His eyebrows lifted. “Oh, but we could.” He pulled her to the other side of the ship, slightly away from the gaping crowd. Wrapping his arms around her, he leaned close to whisper in her ear, “Happy birthday, love.” Sophia melted in his embrace. It was her birthday, wasn’t it? The day she’d been anticipating for months, and here she’d forgotten it completely. Until Gray had appeared on the horizon, she hadn’t been looking forward to anything. But now she did. She looked forward to marriage, and children, and love and grand adventure. Real life and true passion. All of it with this man. “Oh, Gray.” “Please say yes,” he whispered. “Sophia.” The name was a caress against her ear. “I love you.” He kissed her cheek and pulled away. “I’ve been remiss in not telling you. You can’t know how I’ve regretted it. But I love you, Sophia Jane Hathaway. I love you as no man ever loved a woman. I love you so much, I fear I’ll burst with it. In fact, I think I shall burst if I go another minute without kissing you, so if you’ve any mind to say yes, I’d thank you to-“ Sophia flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. Hard at first, to quiet the fool man; then gently, to savor him. oh, how she loved the taste of him, like freshly baked bread and rum. Warm and wholesome and comforting, with just a hint of spice and danger. “Yes,” she sighed against his lips. She pulled back and looked into his eyes. “Yes, I will marry you.” His arms tightened about her waist. “Today?” “Today. But you must let me change my gown first.” Smiling, she stroked his smooth cheek. “You even shaved.” “Every day since we left Tortola.” He gave her a rueful smile. “I’ve a few new scars to show for it.” “Good.” She kissed him. “I’m glad. And I don’t care if society casts us out for the pirates we are, just as long as I’m with you.” “Oh, I don’t know that we’ll be cast out, exactly. We’re definitely not pirates. After your stirring testimony”-he chucked her under the chin-“Fitzhugh decided to make the best of an untenable situation. Or an unhangable pirate, as it were. If he couldn’t advance on his career by convicting me, he figured he’d advance it by commending me. Awarded me the Kestrel as salvage and recommended me to the governor for a special citation of valor. There’s talk of knighthood.” He grinned. “Can you believe it? Me, a hero.” “Of course I believe it.” She laced her fingers at the back of his neck. “I’ve always known it, although I should curse that judge and his ‘citation of valor.’ As if you needed a fresh supply of arrogance. Just remember, whatever they deem you-gentleman or scoundrel, hero or pirate-you are mine.” “So I am.” He kissed her soundly, passionately. “And which would you prefer tonight?” At the seductive grown in his voice, shivers of arousal swept down to her toes. “Your gentleman? Your scoundrel? Your hero or your pirate?” She laughed. “I imagine I’ll enjoy all four on occasion. But tonight, I believe I shall find tremendous joy in simply calling you my husband.” He rested his forehead against hers. “My love.” “That, too.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

Your insecurities may take over; you may feel unattractive or dread that you will be alone the rest of your life. You may begin to doubt the soundness of your decisions and plans. Maybe you’ve always wanted to go back to school, take up a new hobby, or move somewhere else, but suddenly this feels self-indulgent and ridiculous. Your self-esteem may plummet as you become immobilized by indecision. You may backpedal on your plans for a new life because it’s terrifying to venture forth to unfamiliar places. The push to a new relationship or the pull back to the old one—or just sitting and waiting until something comes along—may begin to take hold. Getting into another relationship or losing your resolve to change your life is not going to make anything better—it’s just a temporary panacea. In fact, a new relationship will probably be like the last one because you haven’t learned anything, nor have you worked through the pain of the breakup. Putting your hopes and dreams on hold will not extinguish them; it will just fill you with regret at the end of the next relationship that you didn’t get going on them sooner. Right now, the best thing to do is to meet this challenge head on, work through your grief, make those plans, and change your life.

And always, as far as I know, those who did not take the advice of Father John would bitterly regret their stubbornness in the end. And, as a rule, the next time they would come to see the priest with the fullest intention of following exactly whatever advice he would give. And Father John, with indefatigable sympathy and brimming love, would always take these people back into his great heart, sparing neither his time nor his strength, as he constantly tried to correct their mistakes.

This is going to be a very bad film. It will teach you nothing. You’ll wonder at the end where those few minutes of your life have gone. You’ll feel bitter, resentful and increasingly furious. Now, that’s a tiny example of what pessimism can do for you. It prepares you for the worst, reduces the tension of expectations, protects you from disappointment and might even make you laugh a bit. It should be a recipe for life. We live in an absurdly and painfully optimistic world. Mostly that’s the result of all the business out there trying to sell us things. And understandably, using cheerfulness to do it. And partly, it’s influence of technology, which is always getting better, colouring our view of life as a whole, which often isn’t improving. In the process we’ve lost sight of the wisdom of seeing the glass half empty. For centuries religions peddled dark messages. Buddhism told its followers that life was suffering. Christianity spoke of the fallen state of mankind and of the inevitability of earthly imperfection. It was helpful: it kept our expectations in check. The psychologist, William James, came up with an equation: Happiness equals expectations over reality. So, there are two ways to ensure contentment. Change reality or change expectations. Pessimists know to reduce the expectations. Good pessimists rehearse some key lessons to themselves every day. Life generally goes wrong. Everyone is worried and sad most of the time. It’s normal to have big regrets around careers. The only people we can think of as „normal” are people we don’t yet know very well. It’s hard to be happy for more than 15 minutes. Almost all your hopes are going to be dashed. Mediocrity is the norm. Today, however grim, will probably be one of those days you end up looking back on and wondering why you didn’t appreciate more fully. That’s how much worse it will eventually get. Don’t think of us pessimists as grim; the gap between what should be and what is can be filled with laughter, a generous laughter, but one of certainty that today will go wrong, tomorrow will probably be even worse, until the worst of all happens. But that’s ok.

It was always hard to acknowledge this moment, to look someone in the eye and affirm that their entire existence was coming to an end. But the conviction that I was giving them the chance to navigate their final moments with clarity and grace always helped me temper my own discomfort.

I live my life without regrets; everything I do is measured to see if it fits me. I always try to see the ending before entering. They say life is like a book, and some say life is like a movie. If life were like a book or like a movie, we would reverse and erase the parts we didn't like!

They say "Life is like a book," and some say "Life is like a movie." If life were like a book or like a movie, we would reverse and erase the parts we didn't like! This is why I live my life without regrets; everything I do is measured to see if it fits, and I always try to see the ending before entering.

one of America’s secrets is that the dreams of Huck and Ahab are not always very far apart. Both of them embody an impulse to freedom, an escape from restraints and authority that sometimes seems like the only really American story there is. That one figure is passive and benign, the other aggressive and in the end malignant; the one full of humor and regret, and the other cold and determined never to look back; the one as unsure of his own authority as he is of anyone else’s, the other fleeing authority only to replace it with his own—all this hides the common bond between the two characters, and suggests how strong would be a figure who could put the two together. For all that is different about Ahab and Huck Finn, they are two American heroes who say, yes, they will go to hell if they have to.

But one thing you ought to know about 'death' is that it's real. Never mind it being good or bad, just that it's there. It's always around you. It doesn't wait or chase after you. As I said, it's just there. People who refuse to think about it always end up regretting it later. Just like you are, right now. They think that death has nothing to do with them. They think it's a distant future that can be ignored for time being. You just have to be aware of it. That's enough to change your life. If you don't want to have regrets later, then you must know it now.

That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.

squatted at the corner of the hutch one more time. They’d been trying for an hour to get it loaded, but no matter how many different angles they attempted, it was too heavy for him and Violet to move on their own, especially with Violet’s arm still in a cast. “Let me give it a try.” Barney stepped forward, and Nate scrutinized him. He didn’t appear frail by any stretch, but the man was nearly ninety years old. Nate didn’t want to be responsible for breaking him. “Barnabas Riley, step away from that hutch right this minute.” Gladys bustled into the room, pointing a spatula at her husband. Barney stepped back. “Busted.” But he nudged Nate and whispered, “I wasn’t really going to do it. Just had to show her I’m still willing.” Nate laughed with him, but Violet gave the hutch a regretful pat. “Looks like it wasn’t meant to be.” “Hold on a minute, dear. You’re the one we want to have this.” Gladys disappeared again. Nate and Violet both looked at Barney, but he threw his hands into the air. “Even after sixty-five years of marriage, I don’t understand everything about that woman.” He winked at them again. “Keeps me on my toes.” Three minutes later, Gladys reappeared. “I called Sylvia, and she said her grandson can come over to help us.” “That’s great.” Violet pulled out a chair to sit down and stifled a yawn. She looked exhausted. “In the morning,” Gladys finished. Violet dropped the hand that had been covering her yawn. “I’m sorry. I don’t think we can come back tomorrow.” “Of course not.” Gladys waved her objection away. “You can stay with us. It’s getting late anyway. You don’t want to drive back yet tonight.” Nate stole a subtle peek at the time. It was already eight o’clock. And Violet looked ready to drop. She gave him a questioning look, and he shrugged, hoping she would understand that meant it was up to her. “I guess that would work. The store is always closed on Mondays anyway.” Her eyes traveled to Nate. “Unless you need to be in the office.” He should be. He really should be. If Dad called and he didn’t answer, he would never hear the end of it. But right now, he cared more about what Violet needed. And she needed this hutch to save her store. “I don’t need to be in the office.” “Oh, but Tony―” Violet clasped his arm. She had a point there. He couldn’t leave his dog uncared for. “Unless.” Violet pulled out her phone. “Just a second.” She wandered toward the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear. “Looks like I’m not the only one with a mysterious woman.” Barney chuckled so hard he broke into a coughing fit. “Oh, we’re―” “Neighbors.” Gladys rested a hand on her husband’s back. “We know.” Barney stopped coughing and straightened, shooting Nate a wink. Nate was about to argue more, but Violet stepped back into the room. Her smile was enough to steal his protest. “Sophie’s going to stop by to take care of Tony tonight and tomorrow morning. I hope you don’t mind, but I told her about your super-secret hiding spot for the spare key.” Nate pretended to be shocked. “How do you know about that?” “I saw you putting it under the mat the other day when you forgot your keys, remember?” He did remember. He had been especially enchanted by her laugh that day. It was amazing how many of his recent memories involved her. Including

The blossoms always fall,’ he said. ‘Next year, they’ll come again,’ I said comfortably; I was a stranger here, I was not attuned to the sensibility, I believed that life was for living not for regret. ‘What’s that to me?’ he said. You used to say you would never forget me. That made me feel like the cherry blossom, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of one’s life, after all. And, after all that, for three hundred and fifty-two in each leap year, I never think of you, sometimes. I cast the image into the past, like a fishing line, and up it comes with a gold mask on the hook, a mask with real tears at the ends of its eyes, but tears which are no longer anybody’s tears. Time has drifted over your face.

we almost always end up regretting not taking action or advocating for ourselves sooner. What if instead of fearing failure or the unknown, we started fearing the real bad guy: regret?

Which brings me to a question I ask myself every day: What kind of a father have I been? Have I been good? Have I helped more than I have hurt? Have I given as much as I have taken? In truth, my children have, at times, had trouble. With depression, with drugs, with all those exotic things that befall kids nowadays. Though I do not like all the things they have done, I am here for them when they are in jeopardy and I do whatever I can when they need help. I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem is in our very circumstances, if the life we have given our children—the money and the cars and the vacations and the private planes—has spoiled the everyday world for them. Can the child of a rich man have the same ambition as a kid from the Bronx? One evening, one of my daughters, having just flown on a commercial plane for the first time in her life, called me in a panic. “My God,” she said, “the way they jam you in, and make you sit there, in one seat, it’s like a prison!” In the end, though, I think your outlook has less to do with money than with the values your parents exhibit and your own nature. In this, I’ve been neither perfect nor blameless. I love my children and I think I have been a good father, but there were times when I chose my career over the life of the house. Was I there for every recital, or play, or concert? No, I was working. It’s nearly impossible to succeed in the world and also succeed in the house, which means, at some level, even if you do not realize it, you make a choice. This is a regret. I wish I had been there more, had done better, had given my children as much as my parents gave me. I did not. I was always divided, being pulled away, on the phone, and so forth. But maybe you do best by

I’ve always known I missed her. I’ve always regretted how things ended between us, the fact that I lost my best friend and the love of my life in one fell swoop.

They said he was buried weeks ago.” I nodded. “Back in July. His mom also passed away right afterward, so that just compounded the family chaos. His sister reckoned she died of a broken heart.” “Tragedy breeds more tragedy,” Martina said, studying the smiling face of Old William in the photograph on top of the shrine. I still couldn’t quite imagine the two of them as an item, but that was love in the end. It could tie you to people you would never expect. “Father Time is undefeated,” I said. “Old William told that to me once. It was why he tried to enjoy his life to the fullest. And live without regrets.” “That’s a nice thing to say,” she said. “But reality is always messier than we would like.

With Doug, she talked about the service she wanted. He also asked her if she had any regrets. She said she did have one: She’d always wanted a castle in Scotland. I don’t think this was delirium.

This new world Father Raphael had joined was full of joy and light, and governed by its own particular laws. In this world the help of the Lord would always come when it was truly needed. In this world wealth was ridiculous, and glamour and ostentatiousness absurd, while modesty and humility were beautiful and becoming. Here great and just souls truly judged themselves to be lesser and worse than any other man. Here the most respected were those who had fled from all worldly glory. And here the most powerful were those who with all their hearts had recognized the powerlessness of their own unaided humanity. Here the true power was hidden with frail elders, and it was understood that sometimes it was better to be old and ill than to be young and healthy. Here the youthful would leave behind the usual pleasures of their friends and mates in the normal world, and do so with no regrets, as long as they would not have to leave this special world without which they could no longer live. Here the death of each became a lesson to all, and the end of earthly life was just the beginning.

Her weakness was a circle, sewing back over itself, the same end always in sight and the same regret always destined to repeat.

Food-for-thoughts A moment of reflection & remembrance! Life's road signs!! Going back in life, way back, it is amazing that I can vividly remember the signs that was set up in my path! The ones I followed and the ones l ignored, amazing that I can remember all God's way of telling me which direction he chose for me. The ones l ignored, he told me that this is not my way that he designed my life to be, not necessary a bad one and not even a good one, just not the one designed for me to follow. The ones I followed, is also the same, I just followed because it took me to what God set up for me. Did I like the fact that l ignored some or maybe lots of those signs? At the time, I never thought about it in such away, never!! I thought that I just took the decision to ignore or to follow because that is what I want to !! But little that I know that I was totally blind folded to follow what God designed for me which I guess it is called the "God's chosen path". Now, rewinding, I never regret or being proud of my decision at the time of ignoring or choosing a sign, but yes, sometimes I had to face the circumstances of my choice, some hurt a lot, and many other was good for me, or at least that what I felt at the time. We always say, "I did that" , and "I didn't do that", but we forget that we just walking a designed path that we have very little to do with choosing, succeeding or failing. We are so naive and ridiculously stupid to think in such a way. I did believe in this fact a lot and maybe that's why I took roads and ways that anyone in his right mind, will never take because it was very dangerous, risky, and in sometimes life-threatening decisions and roads, however I never had any fear in walking the walk, never!! Always smiling and yes sometimes smiling mixed with tears from the pain, nevertheless, I smiled. Call me crazy, well I don't mind at all ! Now, when going back to what might had happened or the risks I was taking, I honestly say, I was so stupid and crazy to say the least. But again, it was what had been designed for me, and I will do it all over again, if it is in my choice right now to reach what I am in right now, except one thing only, which is the marriage, a bad investment emotionally and financially!! I so much believed and still believing that I just have one life that can end in any moment regardless of what decision I took or didn't take ! if it meant to be getting hurt or the end of my life, so let it be, and it is God's decision and nothing to do with me. Yes, way back, I did and still totally believe in this fact. Well, life is a rollercoaster, the deeper, faster, steeper, and crazier, the more enjoyable it is. Reaching this edge of life, give you a such sensational feelings nothing can surpass. Maybe my believe in God's gave me the power and pleasure to take chances and reach this edge of life. Just leave life in style and without worries and regrets because it will happen regardless!!! Life is always what we make it to be! Or this what we think it is !!

It's always the ones you never wanted in the first place who become the biggest regret and embarrassment. Bothering you nonstop just to end up being a piece of shit.

a relationship – as long as she wants to admit her ambivalences. It’s dark in places, and funny, and unusual; but these 20 short chapters, each told by a character who may or may not reappear in another piece, are the tragicomic portrait of love. Here, a portion of one of our favorite chapters:   Odile Toscano   Everything gets on his nerves. Opinions, things, people. Everything. We can’t go out anymore without the evening ending badly. I find myself persuading him to go out, yet on the whole I almost always regret it.

Face the facts. Your life is too perfect. You probably lie awake at night, fantasizing about spicin’ up all that lily whiteness you live in.” But damn it, I get a whiff of vanilla from her perfume or lotion. It reminds me of cookies. I love cookies, so this is not good at all. “Gettin’ near the fire, chica, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get burned.” “You touch her and you’ll regret it, Fuentes,” Colin’s voice rings out. He resembles a burro, with his big white teeth and ears sticking out from his buzz cut. “Get the hell away from her.” “Colin,” Brittany says. “It’s okay. I can handle this.” Burro Face brought reinforcements: three other pasty white dudes, standing behind him for backup. I size up Burro Face and his friends to see if I can take them all on, and decide I could give all four a run for their money. “When you’re strong enough to play in the big leagues, jock boy, then I’ll listen to the mierda flyin’ out of your mouth,” I say. Other students are gathering around us, leaving room for a fight that is sure to be fast, furious, and bloody. Little do they know Burro Face is a runner. This time he’s got backup, though, so maybe he’ll stay to duke it out. I’m always prepared for a fight, been in more of ‘em than I can count on my fingers and toes. I’ve got the scars to prove it. “Colin, he’s not worth it,” Brittany says. Thanks, mamacita. Right back at ya. “You threatening me, Fuentes?” Colin barks, ignoring his girlfriend. “No, asshole,” I say, staring him down. “Little dicks like you make threats.” Brittany parks her body in front of Colin and puts her hand on his chest. “Don’t listen to him,” she says. “I’m not afraid of you. My dad’s a lawyer,” Colin brags, then puts his arm around Brittany. “She’s mine. Don’t ever forget that.” “Then keep a leash on her,” I advise. “Or she might be tempted to find a new owner.” My friend Paco comes up beside me. “Andas bien, Alex?” “Yeah, Paco,” I tell him, then watch as two teachers walk down the hall escorted by a guy in a police uniform. This is what Adams wants, perfectly planned to get my ass kicked out of school. I’m not falling into his trap only to end up on Aguirre’s hit list. “Si, everything’s bien.” I turn to Brittany. “Catch ya later, mamacita. I’m looking forward to researching our chemistry.” Before I leave and save myself from suspension on top of my detention, Brittany sticks that perky nose of hers in the air as if I’m the scum of the earth.

I’m leaving,” said Sophon. “Please convey to Dr. Luo Ji the deepest respect of all of Trisolaris. He was a powerful deterrer, a great warrior. Oh, and if you get the chance, also give Mr. Thomas Wade our regrets.” Cheng Xin looked up, surprised. “In our personality studies, your degree of deterrence hovered around ten percent, like a worm wriggling on the ground. Luo Ji’s degree of deterrence was always around ninety percent, like a fearsome cobra poised to strike. But Wade—” Sophon gazed at the setting sun behind the smoke, only a sliver of which now was above ground. Terror glinted from her eyes. She shook her head vigorously, as though trying to chase away a mirage in her mind. “He had no curve at all. No matter what the other environmental parameters were, his degree of deterrence stayed at one hundred percent! What a devil! If he had become the Swordholder, none of this would have been possible. This peace would have had to last. We’ve already waited sixty-two years, but we’d have had to keep on waiting, maybe for fifty more years, or even longer. And then Trisolaris would face an Earth equal to us in technology and power. We’d have to compromise.… However, we knew that humanity would choose you.” Sophon walked away, taking

People always get exactly what they believe to deserve, despite the fact that they may be unhappy with what they have. We are 100% responsible for our destiny, and I would dare to say 200%, because we do create the conditions for the future we end up attracting to our lives. But, the challenge is in learning to see it, and noticing how we do this. Therefore, there's really nothing to regret about life.

People always get exactly what they believe to deserve, despite the fact that they may be unhappy with what they have. We are 100% responsible for our destiny, and I would dare to say 200%, because we do create the conditions for the future we end up attracting to our life. But the challenge is in learning to see it, and noticing how we do this. Therefore, there's really nothing to regret about life.

Dear S, I guess it's too late now. You're off doing what you always told me you've dreamed of doing, and I'm here doing what my parents have always dreamed I'd end up doing. I guess being childhood friends doesn't guarantee staying together. I regret not telling you that I loved you. But I'm not writing this to have my feelings returned. No, I'm writing this to let you know that I'll probably never tell you. I'm writing this because I know I'll never get the courage, let alone the chance, to tell you because you're so far away now. Hey, on the off chance that telepathy works or that you have powers to know everything, I want you to know that I love you -- not just as a childhood friend, but as someone I want to marry.

However, the biggest disappointment was Klay getting pulled over by a cop for a busted car light. The officer smelled marijuana in the vicinity and eventually found some in his car. The aforementioned event led to Klay’s arrest as well as a suspension for a game against the Bruins near the end of the season. Klay’s costly mistake ended up ruining the Cougars’ chance to make it to the NCAA tournament. His father was extremely disappointed in him since he had always taught him to stay away from such things not only in school, but as well as in his professional life. Mychal thought he had made a big enough impact to prevent his son from making foolish choices. Klay quickly regretted the situation and learned from his mistake. The team did qualify for the NIT, which was an exciting opportunity in itself.

It is a peculiar modern superstition that to achieve success in any area we have to make that area the be all and end all of our lives—and live and breathe for that alone. (Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”) Down that way lies the path to idolatry, obsession, restlessness, cut-throat rivalry, and a life marked by either arrogance or bitter regrets. If our best strivings are to remain truly human, they need a goal and a standard outside us to challenge us always to aim higher, but also to bring in fresh air and keep life in perspective. Our goals, tasks and missions are never themselves God. If we try to make them so, they will be idols. Only God is God, and therefore such a goal and standard above all our endeavors. Again, we are to “seek first His kingdom . . . and all these things will be added to you.”20

Dad called the principal before we went to school and he told me the principal was okay with what had happened. However upon entering his office, I felt terribly guilty. The poor man was in a neck collar and it was all my fault. The room smelt of sanitizer. He greeted me with a smile, “Good morning Richard.” I was so glad my dad had come with me! Straight away I burst into a full-blown apology, the words tumbling out of my mouth. He waved his hands to stop my verbal outpouring of regret and sympathy. “It’s okay, Richard, I should have replaced my chair years ago, it has always been a bit wonky. I’m fine, don’t worry. Your Dad told me the whole story and I am proud to have such a caring student at this school.” Now this scenario definitely did not play through my head last night! Then he stood and walked around his desk and put his hand on my shoulder. “Can I give you a piece of advice, Richard?” he asked. I nodded. “Sort out your girl problems, two girls and one guy…it never works out.” Breathing a sigh of relief, I shook my head in agreement, “Thank you Sir, I’ll do that.” At the same time I was thinking…how am I going to do that? He walked us out to the hallway and I hugged Dad goodbye. Walking along this hallway yesterday, I felt full of doom and gloom, but today was different. Until I saw the vice principal standing at the end. I stopped, lowered my eyes and tried to apologize. In a quiet and very firm voice, she said, “I’m watching you.” Then she turned and walked back into her office. Two down, one to go and this person was the most important one…Maddi. I walked into class slightly late and heard a few quiet giggles and whispers. Obviously the kids had been gossiping. Looking around I couldn’t see her, she was away! I let out a huge sigh. All morning I had been looking forward to working it out with her. I waved hi to Gretel, she pulled a face and looked away and that was not a good sign. That look told me that Maddi had believed Linda and that she was really mad and upset. Linda was even later than me. She walked into the classroom with a huge smile on her face and apologized for being late, then she headed towards the vacant seat next to me. I jumped up, grabbed the chair and moved it next to Ted. There was NO WAY she was going to sit next to me! Everyone laughed and she looked embarrassed, but I didn’t care. I had had enough!

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fulness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should kept on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is not more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Every day, Aurora . . . every second, I regretted letting you walk away from me. You were supposed to be mine. So go home and think, really think, because you know that where Declan is, I’ll always be, and vice versa. And if in the end you do choose me, then I’ll be there with you to face what’s coming. If you choose him, then . . .” He trailed off and swallowed roughly. His gaze darted away to stare at the ocean, but he didn’t finish his thought. There wasn’t a need to. “I

Second choice always comes as a result of being realistic and lowering your sights.  If you want to go through life accepting second best, or worse still, third or fourth, then don't be surprised if you end up feeling unfulfilled with your lot.  Set a goal that puts fire in your belly and keep striving until you reach it.  Providing you want it badly enough, you will do whatever it takes. ~ "Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life." - John F. Kennedy ~

I’m having a hard time concentrating at work. Why in the world did I give the task force members offices on my floor? It seemed like a good idea at the time . . . to evict the old guard and move in the staff that represented the company’s one hope for the future. I regret it now, though, because I can’t go an hour without seeing Kathleen Burke. I can’t remember when I’ve felt this frustrated, and that’s saying a lot because I have two preschoolers at home. I noticed Kathleen’s attractiveness the day we met. I noticed it the same way that I might notice that a woman’s hair is gray. It was just a fact. It didn’t matter to me or affect me. A month and a half has passed since then. A month and a half of me sitting in the board room during task force meetings, watching Kathleen give presentations on newfound information she feels passionately about. She always feels passionately about the information she presents. A month and a half of looking up from my desk and seeing her slender body pass by my office in tailored skirts and silky shirts. A month and a half of disagreeing with her over new computer software. When she thinks I’m being pig-headed, her nose scrunches and her brown eyes blaze. My mom told me that her family is Irish. It’s obviously true. Kathleen has the fiery will and the red glint in her hair to prove it. She can’t seem to understand that I’m not being pig-headed about new computer software. I’m just being right. A month and a half of running into her in the break room. She tilts her head when she refills her coffee mug, which causes her long hair to slide over her shoulder and upper arm. A month and a half of hearing her laughter from a distance. A month and a half of receiving correspondence from her signed “Respectfully, Kathleen E. Burke.” Why the E? There are no Kathleen R. or B. or K. Burkes who work at Bradford Shipping. The E is pretentious. A month and a half of looking back every evening when I leave and seeing her office light on. Kathleen’s attractiveness is more than a fact to me now. She’s annoyingly pretty, she’s persistent, and she’s impossible to ignore. For more than two years, I’ve been loyal to Robin’s memory. That’s how I want things to continue. That’s how I like it. Willow and Nora are my life. I spend every hour outside of work with them, and I’m exhausted at the end of each day. There’s no room in my schedule or in my emotions for a relationship. I’m even more certain that I’m not meant to be a boyfriend or a husband now than I was when Robin died. So the distraction of Kathleen makes me feel like I’m betraying a commitment I made to myself. Which, in turn, makes me angry. I’ve been asking God to take away this stupid pull I feel toward Kathleen. Or better yet, to give her a new job in another city or state. My

I guess you always regret the choices you didn’t make, because you imagine that they would have been better choices, that’s the thing. But in the end, you just have to choose something and get on with it. Because if you hedge your bets forever, well, you end up with nothing, don’t you?

Unfortunately it's far too easy to get wrapped up in the process of design, enthralled by architecture in abstract. The fact is that specifications alone have no value. The ultimate goal of a software project is a production system. A software architect must always keep an eye on this goal, and remember that design is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. An architect for a skyscraper who ignored the laws of physics to make the building more beautiful would soon regret it. Losing sight of the goal of working code spells serious trouble for any project.

There’s no wrong decisions. We can always turn deep doo-doo into manure, and grow something to chew on.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fullness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should keep on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is no more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Sitting in a bar for hours on end wouldn’t help matters, but Tristan Archer figured he might as well try it out. It may take him far longer to get drunk than it would if he were human, yet he figured he’d give it a go. After the hellish few months he’d had, he would try anything at this point. He ran a hand through his short, auburn hair that tended to look brown in the bar’s lighting and sighed. He shouldn’t have accepted his friend Levi’s invitation to dinner and drinks at Dante’s Circle in the human realm. He should have rejected the offer and gone back to the thousand other things he had to do within the fae realm and inside the Conclave. Tristan wasn’t just any fae. He was a nine-hundred-year-old fae prince with responsibilities that lay heavily on his shoulders. He was also a Conclave member, where he helped govern every paranormal realm in existence with another fae member and two others from each race. That was how he’d become friends with Levi, a wizard and prince in his own right. So here he was, in Dante’s Circle, a bar owned and named after a royal blue dragon; the meeting place of seven women and their mates with a history he couldn’t immediately comprehend. Of course, it was because one of those women that he’d rather be in the fae realm instead of the dark bar with oak paneling and photos on the walls that spoke of generations of memories and connections. He’d been here a few times in the past, always on the outside of the circle of lightning-struck woman and their mates, but never fully excluded. They’d welcomed Tristan into their fold, even if they didn’t understand why it hurt him so to be that close to what he couldn’t have. Or maybe they understood all too well. After all, one of their own was the reason for his confusion, his torture. The object of his desire. “If you keep glowering at her over in the corner, you’ll end up scaring her more than she already is,” Seth said from his side. Tristan closed his eyes and took a deep breath, immediately regretting the action as soon as he did. The man next to him smelled of the sea. And hope. His heart ached and his dick filled. Seth Oceanus was a merman, a friend, and his mate. His true half. Or at least one of them. Not that he or Seth could do anything about it when the other part of their triad didn’t feel the same way.

The night of the theatrical, Jane and Mr. Nobley secreted themselves behind the house for the final brush-up. The mood of late had let a bit of Bohemia into Regency England, the usual strict social observances bending, the rehearsals allowing the couples to slip away alone and enjoy the exhilarating intimacy of the unobserved. Mr. Nobley sat on the gravel path, leaning back on his elbow in a reluctant recline. “Oh, to die here, alone and unloved…” “That was pretty good,” Jane said. “You genuinely sounded in pain as you said it, but I think you could add a groan or two.” Mr. Nobley groaned, though perhaps not as part of the theatrical. “Perfect!” said Jane. Mr. Nobley rested his head on his knee and laughed. “I cannot believe I let you railroad me into this. I have always avoided doing a theatrical.” “Oh, you don’t seem that sorry. I mean, you certainly are sorry, just not regretful…” “Just do your part, please, Miss Erstwhile.” “Oh, yes, of course, forgive me. I can’t imagine why I’m taking so long, it’s just that there’s something so appealing about you there on the ground, at my feet--” He tackled her. He actually leaped up, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her to the ground. She screeched as she thudded down on top of him. His hands stiffened. “Whoops,” he said. “You did not just do that.” He looked around for witnesses. “You are right, I did not just do that. But if I had, I was driven to it; no jury in the world would convict me. We had better keep rehearsing, someone might come by.” “I would, but you’re still holding me.” His hands were on her waist. They were gorgeous, thick-fingered, large. She liked them there. “So they are,” he said. Then he looked at her. He breathed in. His forehead tensed as if he were trying to think of words for his thoughts, as if he were engaged in some gorgeous inner battle that was provoked by how perfectly beautiful she was. (That last part was purely Jane’s romantic speculation and can’t be taken as literal.) Nevertheless, they were on the ground, touching, frozen, staring at each other, and even the trees were holding their breath. “I--” Jane started to say, but Mr. Nobley shook his head. He apologized and helped her to her feet, then plopped back onto the ground, as his character was still in the throes of death. “Shall we resume?” “Right, okay,” she said, shaking gravel from her skirt, “we were near the end…Oh, Antonio!” She knelt carefully beside him to keep her skirt from wrinkling and patted his chest. “You are gravely wounded. And groaning so impressively! Let me hold you and you can die in my arms, because traditionally, death and unrequited love are a romantic pairing.” “Those aren’t the lines,” he said through his teeth, as though an actual audience might overhear their practice. “They’re better than. It’s hardly Shakespeare.” “Right. So, your love revives my soul, my wounds heal…etcetera, etcetera, and I stand up and we exclaim our love dramatically. I cherish you more than farms love rain, than night loves the moon, and so on…” He pulled her upright and they stood facing each other, her hands in his. Again with the held breaths, the locked gazes. Twice in a row. It was almost too much! And Jane wanted to stay in that moment with him so much, her belly ached with the desire. “Your hands are cold,” he said, looking at her fingers. She waited. They had never practiced this part and the flimsy play gave no directions, such as, Kiss the girl, you fool. She leaned in a tiny bit. He warmed her hands. “So…” she said. “I suppose we know our scene, more or less,” he said. Was he going to kiss her? No, it seemed nobody ever kissed in Regency England. So what was happening? And what did it mean to fall in love in Austenland anyway? Jane stepped back, the weird anxiety of his nearness suddenly making her heart beat so hard it hurt.

cooking with mud was rolling around in it until only our eyes weren’t caked with brown sludge. I loved him on our hour-long bike rides when we played Would You Rather until we had to pull off to the side of the road because we were laughing so hard. I loved him through high school when he was the obsession of almost every girl at our school, but he always put me first. I loved him when he became my first boyfriend and showed me what it felt like to be cherished. I loved him over our long-distance relationship when receiving his text messages would make my day. And I love him now as he gets ready to commit his life to another woman. I will love him forever, and no amount of time or varying circumstances are going to change that. Jax is my best friend. He will always hold the other half of my heart in the figurative BFF necklace that we share. He will be my friend forever. I hop onto my bed and lie back as I click my phone screen, pulling up my Favorites list. My thumb hovers over his name. I take a deep breath and touch his name. My heart thrums wildly as his phone rings twice on the other end. His voice comes through my earpiece, and I almost cry from happiness. I can move to New York tomorrow with no regrets because the world is right as long as Jax and I are friends again. “Little Love.” His voice sounds anxious, hesitant. “Hey, mister.” Another rogue tear escapes, but this tear is full of happiness.

I always thought that Jax was my golden ticket to happiness, but I was wrong. There is joy without Jax, and in actuality, there always has been. In all my happy memories, he was there, and I let myself think that he was the reason. But now, I know that he was just along for the ride, just as I was on his roller coaster through life. He was a passenger on my ride, the one I created. I have the choice to live my life with regret or to live it with gratitude, and I’m choosing the latter. I still don’t understand everything that has happened, and maybe I never will. But I know that this isn’t the end for me. I’m not on the downward slide of life at almost twenty-three. Bigger and better things are out there. A smile warms my face as I focus on the full suitcase sitting next to my bedroom door. I leave tomorrow for New York City. I still can’t wrap my mind around that one either. While looking for photography jobs online this summer, I came across an internship at a huge advertising firm, and I applied on a whim. I knew that the competition would be fierce, and the chances of me getting

hollow laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing but regrets. Doesn’t just about everyone?” “I expect so. You think I don’t wish I hadn’t worked that second shift? But it was overtime and we always had more month left at the end of the paycheck. I’d done it a hundred times. I never really thought about what it could cost. How about you?” He sighed. “Well, of course I regret speeding, even though I’ve made peace with the changes it brought my life. But it kills me to think I lost Iris before I ever knew how much

And yet the end result is not always a happy one, even for those who wind up with a pile of money on the table. Despite having absolute financial security, often for the first time in their lives, many owners find themselves dealing with unanticipated regrets, fighting against depression, and desperately in need of a new identity and sense of purpose. For them, life after the exit is a bleak period, and it can last for years.

ahead. He urged the horse a little faster and when he was within her hearing, he whistled. The piercing sound cut through the air and Vanni turned her mount toward him. She took one look at him, turned and kicked Chico’s flank, taking off. “Goddammit!” he swore. So, this was how it would be—not easy. He was going to have to take off the gloves. He risked being thrown by giving Liberty a snap with the end of his rein. The stallion reared. Paul hung on, then leaned low in the saddle while Liberty closed the space between them. By God, he was going to catch her, make her listen, get through to her. There was no one within shouting distance to distract them. For once in his life, he was going to finish! Even if he had to cover Vanessa’s mouth with his hand! It only took him a few minutes to catch up to her, thanks to Liberty, the champion of the stable. Pulling alongside Vanni he reached out over her hands and grabbed her reins, pulling Chico to a stop. The expression she turned on him was fierce. “What?” she demanded. “Listen to me!” he retorted. “Make it quick!” “Fine. Here’s quick. I love you. I’ve always loved you.I loved you before Matt saw you, but I didn’t have hisguts and I hung back. I’ve regretted that forever. Now I have—” “A baby coming,” she interrupted, lifting her chin. “Listen! I don’t know much about being a father! Just what I watched when I was growing up! And you know what I saw? I saw my parents with their arms around each other all the time! I saw them look at each other with all kinds of emotions—love and trust and commitment and—Vanni, here’s the ugly truth—if I made a baby, I’m not angry about that. It wasn’t on purpose, but I’m not angry. I’ll do my damn best, and I’m real sorry that I’m not in love with the baby’s mother. I’ll still take care of them—and not just by writing a check. I’ll be involved—take care of the child like a real father, support the mother the best I can. What that child is not going to see is his parents looking at each other like they’ve made a terrible mistake. I want him to see his dad with his arms around his wife and—” “Did you try?” she asked. “Did you give the woman who’s got your baby in her a chance?” “Is that what you want for her? She’s a decent person, Vanessa—she didn’t get pregnant on purpose. You want her stuck with a man who’s got another woman on his mind? I didn’t want this to happen to her—I’m not sticking her with half a husband! She deserves a chance to find someone who can give her the real thing.” “But she loves you. She does, doesn’t she? She wanted to get married.” “Vanessa, she’s scared and alone. It’s what comes to mind. She’ll be all right when she realizes I’m not going to let her down. And I’m not going to—” “All this because you couldn’t open your mouth and say how you felt, what you wanted,” she said hotly. “I wanted so little from you—just a word or gesture—some hint that you had feelings for me. Instead, you took your wounded little heart to another woman and—” She stopped her tirade as she saw his eyes narrow and his frown deepen. He glared at her for a long moment, then he jumped off the stallion, her mount’s reins still in his hands. He led the horses the short distance to the river’s edge, to a bank of trees. “What are you doing?” she asked, hanging on to the pommel. He secured the horses at a fallen tree, then reached up to her, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her none too gently out of the saddle. He whirled her around and pressed her up against a tree, holding her wrists over her head and pinioning her there with the whole length of his body. His face was close to hers. “You never opened your mouth, either,” he said. She was stunned speechless. She couldn’t remember a time Paul had ever behaved like this—aggressive, commanding. He leaned closer. “Open it now,” he demanded of her just before he covered her mouth with his.

He urged the horse a little faster and when he was within her hearing, he whistled. The piercing sound cut through the air and Vanni turned her mount toward him. She took one look at him, turned and kicked Chico’s flank, taking off. “Goddammit!” he swore. So, this was how it would be—not easy. He was going to have to take off the gloves. He risked being thrown by giving Liberty a snap with the end of his rein. The stallion reared. Paul hung on, then leaned low in the saddle while Liberty closed the space between them. By God, he was going to catch her, make her listen, get through to her. There was no one within shouting distance to distract them. For once in his life, he was going to finish! Even if he had to cover Vanessa’s mouth with his hand! It only took him a few minutes to catch up to her, thanks to Liberty, the champion of the stable. Pulling alongside Vanni he reached out over her hands and grabbed her reins, pulling Chico to a stop. The expression she turned on him was fierce. “What?” she demanded. “Listen to me!” he retorted. “Make it quick!” “Fine. Here’s quick. I love you. I’ve always loved you.I loved you before Matt saw you, but I didn’t have hisguts and I hung back. I’ve regretted that forever. Now I have—” “A baby coming,” she interrupted, lifting her chin. “Listen! I don’t know much about being a father! Just what I watched when I was growing up! And you know what I saw? I saw my parents with their arms around each other all the time! I saw them look at each other with all kinds of emotions—love and trust and commitment and—Vanni, here’s the ugly truth—if I made a baby, I’m not angry about that. It wasn’t on purpose, but I’m not angry. I’ll do my damn best, and I’m real sorry that I’m not in love with the baby’s mother. I’ll still take care of them—and not just by writing a check. I’ll be involved—take care of the child like a real father, support the mother the best I can. What that child is not going to see is his parents looking at each other like they’ve made a terrible mistake. I want him to see his dad with his arms around his wife and—” “Did you try?” she asked. “Did you give the woman who’s got your baby in her a chance?” “Is that what you want for her? She’s a decent person, Vanessa—she didn’t get pregnant on purpose. You want her stuck with a man who’s got another woman on his mind? I didn’t want this to happen to her—I’m not sticking her with half a husband! She deserves a chance to find someone who can give her the real thing.” “But she loves you. She does, doesn’t she? She wanted to get married.” “Vanessa, she’s scared and alone. It’s what comes to mind. She’ll be all right when she realizes I’m not going to let her down. And I’m not going to—” “All this because you couldn’t open your mouth and say how you felt, what you wanted,” she said hotly. “I wanted so little from you—just a word or gesture—some hint that you had feelings for me. Instead, you took your wounded little heart to another woman and—” She stopped her tirade as she saw his eyes narrow and his frown deepen. He glared at her for a long moment, then he jumped off the stallion, her mount’s reins still in his hands. He led the horses the short distance to the river’s edge, to a bank of trees. “What are you doing?” she asked, hanging on to the pommel. He secured the horses at a fallen tree, then reached up to her, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her none too gently out of the saddle. He whirled her around and pressed her up against a tree, holding her wrists over her head and pinioning her there with the whole length of his body. His face was close to hers. “You never opened your mouth, either,” he said. She was stunned speechless. She couldn’t remember a time Paul had ever behaved like this—aggressive, commanding. He leaned closer. “Open it now,” he demanded of her just before he covered her mouth with his.

I guess there’s nothing else to say.” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, crooking a finger. “Come here.” Her throat went dry, and her heart gave a thud. On instinct, she shook her head. His expression turned ruthlessly intent. “Maddie, I’ve been thinking about that mouth of yours for almost twenty-four hours straight. You don’t think I’m going to let you go without touching you, do you?” Had it only been one day? How was that even possible? It seemed as though a lifetime had passed since she’d run out on her wedding. “Um . . .” She swallowed hard and squeaked out, “Yes?” A long pause filled with sexual awareness so thick it practically coated the air. How did he do it, flip the mood? Only moments ago, she’d felt bereft, but with one wicked glance she’d forgotten everything dogging her. “I’ll tell you what.” He smiled, and it was so filled with cunning that the fine hairs on her neck rose in anticipation. “Tell me you won’t regret it and we can end things right here with a friendly pat on the back.” “I-I d-don’t know what you mean,” she lied, loving and hating the direction the conversation had taken. “Do I need to spell it out?” “No?” The word was a question instead of the statement she’d intended. “You want to take care of yourself, right?” She nodded, sensing a trap but unable to stop playing into his hands. He leaned close, placing his elbow on the console, taking up every spare inch of breathing room. “You’re ready to ditch the good Catholic girl and start doing what you want?” The strange mixture of lust and irritation he evoked pulled in her stomach. “Well, when you put it that way.” The curve of his lips held a distinct sexual tilt. “If you get out of this car untouched, tell me you won’t lie in bed late at night and regret it. Tell me you won’t wonder and wish you’d done things differently.” Her pulse hammered and her throat dried up, leaving her unable to breathe, let alone speak. He stroked a path over the line of her jaw, and Maddie forced her eyes to stay open instead of fluttering closed from sheer desire. Why did it feel like an eternity since he’d touched her? Even more troubling, why did his hands feel so right? The slightly rough pads of his fingers trailed down the curve of her neck, leaving an explosion of tingles coursing through her. “And remember, Princess,” he said, in a deep rumble of a voice that vibrated through her as though he were her own personal tuning fork. “Lying is a sin.” She gasped, sucking in the last available bit of air left in the car. “That’s a low blow.” He gave a seductive laugh, filled with heat and promise and the kind of raw passion she’d always dreamed about. “I’m not above playing dirty.” A sly smirk as he rubbed a lazy circle over skin she hadn’t known was sensitive. “In fact, I think you prefer it that way.” “I do not!” Her heart beating far too fast, she clutched at the credit card hard enough to snap it in two. “Liar.” He slipped under the collar of her T-shirt to wrap a possessive hand around the nape of her neck. “I’m waiting.” She gritted her teeth to keep from moaning. How did one man feel so good? Hot and sinful. Irresistible. She whispered, “For what?” “My answer,” he said, inching closer. Their mouths mere inches away. She swallowed hard. The truth sat on the tip of her tongue, and for once in her life, she decided to speak it instead of stuffing it back down. “I’d regret it.” “Exactly,” he said, the word a soft breath against her skin. The pad of his thumb brushed over her bottom lip, sliding over the dampness until it felt swollen. Needy. “I can’t live with myself unless I’ve tasted this mouth.” This

I recently told Logan that I’m his biological father. It is St. Martin blood that runs through his veins. He’s your brother now and always. For two years I had an affair with Logan’s mother, Anne Champagne. That’s where the wrong in this story ends; I will never regret my actions with Anne. I can’t even bring myself to say I was wrong because what happened brought Logan into my life. For that I will never be sorry.” Cliff looked around the table and admitted, “I betrayed your mother and my friend, but that is my shame and mine alone. None of that extends to Logan. I feel nothing but pride in him.” Jessie felt tears clog her throat. When Michael leaned toward Logan and kissed his arm, she wanted to hug them both. Cliff turned to Logan and said, “I love you, son. I know you’re upset with me and you have every right to be, but you are my son and I love you, have loved you with as much ferocity as I’ve loved all these other barbarians.” Tears

There is a saying amongst my people that reflects this. Within every heart lives two dragons, a dragon of Hope and a dragon of Hate, both mighty and powerful in equal measure. They war constantly, always struggling for dominance to be the rightful ruler of your heart. You feed them with your actions. All that drives us in life is fuelled by either hope or hate. Hate is the dark mirror of hope, empowering our hearts with the same fire and energy but striving for different ends. Hate drives us to bring those above us to ruin, while hope exalts us to raise ourselves up beyond where we are. We want to better ourselves, or drag down someone else so we are on top. The destruction of the gnomes had taken with it the dragon of our hate, but hope could not flare up to take its place; hope was already dead within us. We were soulless, cast adrift and ready to settle down to wait for death. I remember these times as being some of the hardest of them all, not because of pain, or suffering, or loss…but because I no longer felt anything at all. Both dragons lay dead, and my heart was a barren wasteland cloaked in winter. While this wounded me greatly, it was better than the alternative. I said many things, did many things, that I regret in this time of my life, but I always feel the slightest bit of pride that at that moment, right when I had nothing, I didn’t feed Hate and nurse it back to health. Most manage to find an equilibrium in their hearts between Hate and Hope, controlling the former while encouraging the latter, and for most, this is a happy and content existence. Some find that Hope’s strength overpowers Hate easily, and that they are able to do noble things effortlessly and naturally simply by following their intrinsic sense of righteousness. However, some embrace that hateful dragon within them, that boiling black pit of rage that simmers and bubbles out of sight, ushering them into darkness and wickedness too numerous to count. They embrace this powerful ally and use it to great effect. Sometimes my surface friends wonder why anyone would do this, would willingly plunge themselves into shadow and wrath. Even humans, that most flexible and different of species, almost universally espouse the idea that good is preferable to evil, and that it is better to be noble than to be malicious, even when they do not believe it. Why would anyone listen to that whisper from Hate, the dark voice urging them to abandon Hope and to

Did he regret the change? Did Khârn, the most faithful of all Angron’s sons, wish for things to be different? Maybe. Except that he had never known his master undamaged. He had never seen him in his youth, before the Nails had been inserted, and so his loyalty had always been given to a broken angel. And after that, once he’d been given the same bad medicine as his master, it had been easier just to wash any doubt away with fresh blood. When you killed a man, a woman, a child – when you ended a fragile flame of life, when you took away the chance of any further development, of happiness, of sadness, or selfishness or vice or sainthood or intellect – when you did that, in that one moment, the torment ceased. Just a fragment, an atom of peace amid an eternity of rage. But at the same time, in that fleeting glimpse of sanity, you could recall everything you once were. You could remember discourse, and laughter, even pity. And so you had to start again, to move to the next victim, the next challenge, because that knowledge was the worst goad of all. To kill.

I’m sorry, Grandfather. I’m sorry that this is how it ends for you. I’m sorry that your last words were not ones said surrounded by family and friends. I’m sorry that you died alone in hospice and that you left the world without anyone by your side. I know that it’s too late, but we are here. And whether you can or can’t see us, you were our grandfather and we’ll always love you,” Noah finished.

The road of sin always ends in despair instead of delight and in anger in place of awe, because you and I make tremendous children, but terrible compasses! God alone is our anchor. It is only when His Name, His Word, His Promise, and His Presence are elevated as our treasure that we will ever experience hope. The system of sin is built to get us to shift our gaze and to lose our days playing the game of shame, or entitlement, or both. And our enemy doesn’t care which way we minimize the Cross. He will gladly take us focusing on the mirror to bury ourselves in shame and regret, or to spend our lives comparing to and blaming everyone else. As long as we remain on the throne of our lives, it doesn’t matter which way we flip the coin.

The reality is that when someone dies, there are always regrets.

Iwanted to go after her and stop her, but what use would it be? She was right. We always ended up in the same place. Our passions would get away from us and then she’d run off regretting it. What was the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

The reality is that when someone dies, there are always regrets. Those of us who remain can’t help but wonder what we could have done differently. And how things may have ended up if we had.

It's funny that Jake brought up intelligence earlier. His question about the smartest human in the world. It's like Jake knew I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about all of these things. Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret? It's been on my mind a lot, Jake's intelligence. Not just now. I've been thinking about it for a while.

I know I will never see that smile the same way again, it will never bring me instant comfort nor warm my soul the same again. I know I will miss the flood of emotions that released for your touch to point of dehydration. I will miss the small, pulsating, vibrations running through my body as your voice ricochet in my ear. I will miss the beauty I saw in your pain as you took me on a journey through your soul, thu conversations I will miss our inner child's spontaneous and planned play dates. I will miss the silence in my mind commanded by you taking the lead. I will miss daydreaming about loving you forever, because I still had an ounce of hope leftover after a lifetime of searching for you. I will miss you forgiving me after, I recovered from a trigger, never appreciated the punishment that came with it tho. I will miss not being able to protect your heart from the pain I recognize, that your ego guards from your souls innocents that your mind can't tolerate yet. I will miss the feeling I felt knowing you could really be here with me forever because the exchange of laughter, wisdom and moments never ended. I will miss loving the man you are now in life, because even without the potential I see, you are worthy just as you are . I will miss things about you that you will never know, it was never about status or statuses I didn't want the spotlight, I wanted to be behind the scenes. I just wanted to support and love you. I wanted to guide you through parts of life that almost broke me, that I see you encountering. I will miss having somewhere to pour almost all of me. I will miss the possibility of being loved forever, I know I felt it though the roughness of your sore hands as I caressed trying to alleviate the pain. I will miss your grumpy days and I still regret not knowing how to comfort you on the hardest ones. I will miss who I sometimes selfishly dreamed I could be if you could just love me in the way I could feel. I'd dream of waiting for u to get home, (its the one we talked about getting after winning the lottery) . In that moment I swear it was the first time my soul wanted another day voluntarily. I will miss you not understanding my text, but we would see eye to eye when they physically met. I will miss you teaching me, and correcting me softly. I will miss you being gentle, when I didn't even know I needed it. I know it was hard sometimes. I will miss how you kept things together, always calm and steady, I was the complete opposite, clumsy and messy. You were everything I wasn't, and I loved you for that the most. I will miss thinking of you as my sun, and I will miss you calling me Starr I will miss loving you beyond myself. I will miss all those moments I wanted to pull u into me and just feel you and kiss you. I wanted you all the time, it took so much to hold back from showing you, it was out of fear of rejection of not being enough. I SHOULD of done it, would of got to this point faster. I regret not loving you with all me authenticly. I will miss what never was a friend, but everything I never had In one

And then he talked about what had happened. The shattering events. And the healing. He ended his address by saying, “We are all of us marred and scarred and imperfect. We make mistakes. We do things we deeply regret. We are tempted and sometimes we give in to that temptation. Not because we’re bad or weak, but because we’re human. We are a crowd of faults. But know this.” He stood in complete silence for a moment, the huge auditorium motionless. “There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know.” He paused again. “I need help. Those are the signposts. The cardinal directions.” And then he smiled again, the creases deep, his eyes bright.

Abraham Lincoln occasionally got fuming mad with a subordinate, one of his generals, even a friend. Rather than taking it out on that person directly, he’d write a long letter, outlining his case why they were wrong and what he wanted them to know. Then Lincoln would fold it up, put the letter in the desk drawer, and never send it. Many of these letters survive only by chance. He knew, as the former emperor of Rome knew, that it’s easy to fight back. It’s tempting to give them a piece of your mind. But you almost always end up with regret. You almost always wish you hadn’t sent the letter. Think of the last time you flew off the handle. What was the outcome? Was there any benefit?

You can spend so much time and energy questioning yourself—what went wrong, who’s to blame, could I have done something differently—that it can prevent you from moving on. I think every breakup is a journey of realizing that the universe has something greater in mind for you. Trust me, I get it: ending a relationship feels like the end of the world. Sometimes it felt like I’d never be happy again. But as time passes and your heart mends, you pick yourself up and carry on. And at least now you know what your heart is capable of feeling. I always had to believe that this one person was meant to teach me something about myself to get me ready for whoever was coming my way next. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be until I met that next person—who brought out in me the new things I’d learned or parts of myself I’d gotten in touch with—that faith was truly restored.

My biggest regret will always be allowing my family to completely destroy the life of my betrothed…and my unborn child’s father.” 

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There is a whisper in the waterfall, in a place no one knows about, no one has been to, somewhere where the open range stretches for miles and the horses run wild, and free and the air is crisp and fresh, and the line trees touch the sky and the wolf sleeps in the shade of the moon, my time is spent writing all my visions, all that I see and hear, sitting in my room, in the distant lands a lady sits in front of the mirror in a log cabin, across the ocean, combing her hair wondering where all her younger days have gone, and the dreams she dreamed why they never came through, her graceful eyes smile with contented embrace of the moment, as the open fire crackles in the darkness of the cabin throwing shadows onto the wall, and there’s me sitting in my room I can see her but I cannot reach her, the cat is out in the forest hunting in the light of the moon, and the dog is curled up by the fire fast asleep in solitude in silence and calm, there is nothing to explain, there is nothing to challenge the time as it ticks away at our life, in the silence of the night I am searching for answers, but none is coming forth, I guess this is how life has been for centuries, no one survives this journey, oh this desire and the passion was so strong, now it flickers in the wilderness of life, as the old age sets in, somehow beauty survives, there is always beauty before my eyes, from the past and now, and the future, it shines and embraces all the other eyes that see me with blessings of love, that is like a reservoir of love in my heart and soul, this love is in every breath I take, and every breath I exhale, nothing was lost end of the day, my heart and soul was calm and love flowed out like invisible aura into the world blessing people and animals alike and the great quantum physics of nature that has blessed me for so many years in my solitude, in my love, in my life, in my harmony, we can only find strength in our own being, yes, and as the poets write the words onto paper that only their inner self understands, I reflect on life, and give my flake of meaning, I am alone, but not lonely, as Leonard Cohen sings in the back ground, and my life feels complete, and there is dept to beauty that I experience and feel, and so life goes on my friend, just enjoy each day for each day there is nothing else there never was, stop chasing the future or regret the past, for life passes so fast, stay grounded and in the now

The silence between us, around us, rivaled the end of time. The shrubs may have wilted, the river may have evaporated away, every hydrogen and oxygen atom sucked into space. Everything in existence drifting farther and farther away, endlessly and quietly fading. Then, a pebble slipped into the river, reprimanding the water for staring and reminding it that it had a job to do. With some regret, the river moved on but kept thinking about our stories as it sloshed and trickles back to life. Soon the fuscus, prompted by the river's resumption of its duties, began to wave back and forth once again, shaking off the droplets the river splashed on its stalks. The trees around us, taking note of their part in the story, twitched their noir leaves as the wind spurred them on, and a rustling like bells filled my ears. The clouds, always the last to hear about anything, understood that they too had to move on. So, they scooched along and let the sun have a turn. We didn't say anything. Didn't move. We simply lay on the brown grass and the black soil as we stared up at the sky, watching the clouds billow past the daffodil sun, our hands, still nested together, keeping us tethered to our reality.

Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and your sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the time-bound state of consciousness. There are three ways in which the ego will treat the present moment: as a means to an end, as an obstacle, or as an enemy. Let us look at them in turn, so that when this pattern operates in you, you can recognize it and—decide again. To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.

What about ‘The Girl I Left Behind’?” Abigail suggested. “I found the music in the piano bench.” She had heard that when soldiers used to leave the post, heading for battle, the company band would play that song. Oliver shook his head. “I don’t want to leave my girl behind. I want her by my side.” He gave Abigail a look so filled with longing that a lump formed in her stomach. Oh no, Oliver. You don’t mean it. You know I’m not your girl, and I won’t ever be. Oblivious to the thoughts that set Abigail’s insides churning, Charlotte nodded vigorously. “That shouldn’t stop us from singing it,” she insisted. “It’s a pretty song.” And it was. Were it not for her concerns that Oliver wanted something she could not give, Abigail could have spent hours listening to him and her sister, for their voices blended beautifully. At the end of the evening, Abigail accompanied Oliver to the door. Though she hoped he would simply say good night as he had before, the way he cleared his throat and the uneasiness she saw on his face made Abigail fear that her hopes would not be realized. Perhaps if she kept everything casual, he would take the cue. “Thank you for coming,” she said as they walked onto the front porch. “Charlotte always enjoys your duets.” “And you?” They were only two words, but Oliver’s voice cracked with emotion as he pronounced them. Please, Oliver, go home. Don’t say something you’ll regret. Though the plea was on the tip of her tongue, Abigail chose a neutral response. “I enjoy listening to both of you.” Oliver stroked his nose in a gesture Abigail had learned was a sign of nervousness. “That’s not what I meant. I hope you enjoy my company as much as I do yours. I look forward to these visits all day.” His voice had deepened, the tone telling Abigail he was close to making a declaration. If only she could spare him the inevitable pain of rejection. “It’s good to have friends,” she said evenly. Oliver shook his head. “You know I want to be more than your friend. I want to marry you.” “I’m sorry.” And she was. Though Ethan claimed Oliver bounced back from rejection, she hated being the one to deliver it. “You know marriage is not possible. Woodrow . . .” Abigail hesitated as she tried and failed to conjure his image. “Woodrow isn’t here.” Oliver completed the sentence. “I am. I lo—” She would not allow him to continue. While it was true that Oliver’s visits helped lift Charlotte’s spirits and filled the empty space left by Jeffrey’s absence, Abigail could not let him harbor any false hopes. “Good night, Lieutenant Seton.” Perhaps the use of his title would tell him she regarded him as a friend, nothing more. What appeared to be sadness filled Oliver’s eyes as his smile faded. “Is there no hope for me?” Abigail shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid not.” He stood for a moment, his lips flattened, his breathing ragged. At last, he reached out and captured her hand in his. Raising it to his lips, Oliver pressed a kiss to the back. “Good night, Miss Harding,” he said as he released her hand and walked away.

I always ended up doing things I didn’t want to do today just so I didn’t regret not doing them tomorrow.

I've chosen fear over fear over faith more times then I can count. And every time I did, I ended up with regrets. When I chose faith, I didn't always get the outcome I wanted, but I never regretted my choice because I felt God beside me, holding my hand and lending me strength.

Over the thousands of years, it seems things have not really changed much when you take out the things and think only of the people.... I deeply regret wasted time--for it was never mine alone to waste. I would rather be nothing in the eyes of the world, if something, anything of value in the eyes of God. Too often, myself guilty in the past, when I read poetry the "I" is prominent. I have come to a point in life where I would rather less to stand-out, be a dominant personality, and more to be part of the blended solutions. Too often we let the world measure our worth by what we have become referencing their values, excluding the far greater--all of them we have avoided becoming. On old age: if you keep your sense of humor, you have kept your best sense. The expression of love gives the soul wings, and a never-ending span of light.... Nothing is truly alive, if living outside of love. May that truth be fact, fiction or falsehood: what is memorable, the thing we can't reach and fully touch, but recognize as art, is always truth. Having lived with a cat for the past six years--I am thoroughly convinced that both Pavlov and his dog were conditioned by Pavlov's Cat.... We see and feel far less with our senses...and more with our predilections. Truth be told, no one sees truth clearly as God sees it. After speaking with a much younger man than myself today, I discovered, that reaching 70 years old has some unintended consequences--Intelligence. Though he or she may think so, no writer knows entirely what is being said (as for truth--a figment of intellectual imagination); but, to create a tingle in the reader (a living word...ah!) That is nearer Divine! Love needs no affirmation but its presence. If I could only keep from getting in my own way! When forgetting we are co-creators with God, our behavior is that of independent destroyers. Art! It is like human love--controlling and all consuming when living with it…death without it! If I have learned anything from life, it is that I know nothing; and the mystery of my journey is to douse the lesser-ego with incendiary making ready for Divine spark.... The all-seeing eye of the heart if allowed to open will always see love first.... Love is patient...quietly awaiting to show despite our rejection—abiding in silence as ordered until our cloaking lifted for release and full expression. What joy that moment of uncovering—the heart purely exposed, our greatest lamp. While looking at a picture of a magnificent wasps' nest I thought: 'Amazing how creatures so small seem to have capacity for thought so large....' Children do have a way of bringing us back into focus, usually throwing a slow curve that ends up being a strike to the heart of the matter. Some large lessons of love have come to me from much smaller sizes than myself.

Live without regret. Follow your dreams and follow your heart, no matter where it may lead you. Everyone's life ends in death. The setting, be it spaceships or a quiet hospital room in one of our many cities, will always be different. However, they all lead to a single closing moment in which we take a last breath. Take that breath knowing you made your mark on the world around you. In fact, live every single moment of your life as if it were your last. In doing so, everything else will fall into place. Your loved ones will know where you stand. Your life will be full of happiness. Most importantly, when your moment finally arrives, you'll be able to leave smiling. That's what matters in the end.

I thought to myself then that it didn't matter where I ended up; I'd always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I had done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn't. I'd never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you're happy about that. Maybe not. Maybe you're carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I'm not. I'm just the one to tell it, at least my part in it, the story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It's an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise.

You, more than most, know the concept of right and wrong. And so does Julian. Why have you endured, resisted wrong, when others turned? You fought for justice, for our people. You had a code, and you have always lived up to it, as you are doing now. You say you have no feeling, but what of the compassion you felt for your lifemate when she was so frightened? You cannot turn. Every moment is an eternity for you, I know, but you have an end in sight." Gregori's cold eyes seemed to impale Aidan, but the younger Carpathian did not flinch. He held Gregori's gaze until Alexandria could have sworn she saw a flicker of fire, a flame, springing from one to the other. Gregori's hard mouth softened slightly. "You have learned well, Aidan. You are a healer of both body and mind." Aidan inclined his head in acknowledgement of the compliment. The wind howled, the waves crashed, and Gregori launched himself into the dark, roiling clouds. A black shape spread across the sky, an ominous shadow staining the heavens, and then it moved north and faded away as if it had never been, taking the storm with it. Aidan sank into the sand, his head bowed, his shoulders shaking, as if he was trying to control some great emotion that had overcome him. Alexandria circled his head with her arms. She could feel sobs tearing at his throat and chest, yet he made no sound. Only a single, blood-red tear marked his great sorrow. "I am sorry, cara, but he is a great man, one our people cannot afford to lose. I could feel his bleakness, the inner demon waiting to devour him. To have to honor my promise to him, to have to hunt him..." He shook his head. "It is such a disservice to one who has dedicated his life to our people, to our Prince." Alexandria's breath caught in her throat. She had thought Aidan invincible. Capable, even, of hunting vampires and triumphing over their evil power. But Gregori was a different proposition. Even with two hunters such as Aidan, it didn't seem possible that he could be defeated. "Can't you contact this woman, the one who could save him?" Aidan shook his head regretfully. "He would continue to honor his vow, and her presence would only make things worse.

I believe that human beings are always acting in the service of needs and values. This is true whether the action does or does not meet the need, or whether it’s one we end up celebrating or regretting.

I love you, Kris. I’m always going to love you,” he whispered. “Please forgive me.” I looked away from him, wiping a tear from my cheek. “I can forgive you if you can forgive me back.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pressed his cheek to the side of my head. Our embrace was full of loss and regrets and what-ifs. Tyler was a version of my life. A path I could have taken. But now I was so far off course I didn’t even know where I was going anymore. All I knew was I was headed for a dead end. And when I got there, I’d be alone. “Kristen, have you ever heard of the red thread of fate?” Tyler said over me. “No.” I sniffled. He turned me until I sat facing him. “I’ve been studying Mandarin,” he said, speaking to my eyes. “Learning a lot about the Chinese culture. And there was a story I read that really resonated with me.” He reached out and tenderly wiped a tear off my cheek with his thumb. “In Chinese legend, two lovers are connected by an invisible red thread around their pinky fingers. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers from birth, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. The cord might stretch or tangle, but it can never break.” His eyes moved back and forth between mine. “You are on the other end of my thread, Kris. No matter how far apart we are, you’re tied to me. I stretched us and I tangled us and I’m sorry. But I didn’t break us, Kris. We’re still connected.” He paused. That pause that he always did on the phone, the one that told me he was about to tell me the good part. Then he pulled a tiny, black velvet box from his pocket and opened the lid. My heart stopped dead. Oh my God. “Marry me.

Non avrai le mie lacrime, non avrai la mia rabbia, non avrai neanche gocce d'oddio, non avrai i miei rimorsi, non avrai la mia porta aperta, ma ho sempre aperto l'orizzonte verso la verità e quella verità non c'è nelle tue mani, quella verità è il tuo incubo, quella verità è la tua tribolazione, quella verità è il tuo fallimento, quella verità è il tuo nemico, quella verità è il tuo veleno, quella verità è la tua fine." ~ Angelica Hopes, citazione dal primo libro dal Karmic Harvest Trilogy Translation of my Italian verses: You won't have my tears, you won't have my rage, you won't even have any drop of hatred, you won't have my regrets, you won't have my door open, but I always opened the horizon towards the truth, and that truth is not in your hands, that truth is your nightmare, that truth is your misery that truth is your downfall, that truth is your enemy, that truth is your poison, that truth is your end. ~ Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn, Book 1, Introduction, Karmic Harvest Trilogy excerpt

His … but … Ron, you’re not …?’ Ron held up his badge. Mrs Weasley let out a shriek just like Hermione’s. ‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! Oh, Ron, how wonderful! A prefect! That’s everyone in the family!’ ‘What are Fred and I, next-door neighbours?’ said George indignantly, as his mother pushed him aside and flung her arms around her youngest son. ‘Wait until your father hears! Ron, I’m so proud of you, what wonderful news, you could end up Head Boy just like Bill and Percy, it’s the first step! Oh, what a thing to happen in the middle of all this worry, I’m just thrilled, oh, Ronnie –’ Fred and George were both making loud retching noises behind her back but Mrs Weasley did not notice; arms tight around Ron’s neck, she was kissing him all over his face, which had turned a brighter scarlet than his badge. ‘Mum … don’t … Mum, get a grip …’ he muttered, trying to push her away. She let go of him and said breathlessly, ‘Well, what will it be? We gave Percy an owl, but you’ve already got one, of course.’ ‘W-what do you mean?’ said Ron, looking as though he did not dare believe his ears. ‘You’ve got to have a reward for this!’ said Mrs Weasley fondly. ‘How about a nice new set of dress robes?’ ‘We’ve already bought him some,’ said Fred sourly, who looked as though he sincerely regretted this generosity. ‘Or a new cauldron, Charlie’s old one’s rusting through, or a new rat, you always liked Scabbers –’ ‘Mum,’ said Ron hopefully, ‘can I have a new broom?’ Mrs Weasley’s face fell slightly; broomsticks were expensive. ‘Not a really good one!’ Ron hastened to add. ‘Just – just a new one for a change …’ Mrs Weasley hesitated, then smiled. ‘Of course you can … well, I’d better get going if I’ve got a broom to buy too. I’ll see you all later … little Ronnie, a prefect! And don’t forget to pack your trunks … a prefect … oh, I’m all of a dither!’ She gave Ron yet another kiss on the cheek, sniffed loudly, and bustled from the room. Fred and George exchanged looks. ‘You don’t mind if we don’t kiss you, do you, Ron?’ said Fred in a falsely anxious voice. ‘We could curtsey, if you like,’ said George. ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Ron, scowling at them.

He spoke through an interpreter, but the discussion flowed easily. He acknowledged concerns I raised about the situation in Tripoli. He smiled but offered no assurances when I said I hoped he would make the transition from rebel commander to politician. Libya would need more talented politicians than soldiers, I argued, in what would surely be a difficult transition from a family-run kleptocracy to a nascent democracy. His commitment and the commitment of other devout Muslims to peaceful political change would be essential to building a functioning and lasting democratic polity. “We might have disagreements between us,” I acknowledged, “about political issues and the future of the region. But as long as you’re committed to the democratic process, we can have a good relationship.” At the end of the meeting, in a quieter voice, I mentioned I had recently learned that Americans had detained and interrogated him using tactics that should not have been allowed and were not allowed any longer. I knew about his rendition to Libya, and the years of torture he had suffered in prison. I assumed someone had briefed him on my military background and service in Vietnam, and I tried to relate to him as a former military officer who had entered politics and as one torture victim to another. I told him it had always been important to me that my country act honorably in war and peace, even when our enemies did not. “Some of us in the delegation have worked to outlaw mistreatment of our prisoners because it doesn’t befit a great nation.” He looked me in the eyes the entire time I was speaking, but I don’t remember him nodding his head or in any other way acknowledging my words. But when I added that I knew his wife had been mistreated, his eyes welled with tears. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “and as an elected representative of my country, I apologize for what happened, for the way you and especially your wife were treated, and for all you suffered because of it.” He leaned toward me and expressed through the interpreter his appreciation for the apology. “We regret all that happened,” he said, “but we don’t think of revenge. We will behave responsibly in Libya. Our actions will be governed by law and we will live up to universal standards.” I thanked him for that assurance, and the meeting ended. I never saw him again after our meeting. He did, in fact, become a leading Islamist politician in Libya, and, I’ve heard, quite a wealthy man. I don’t for a moment assume his views and career decisions were influenced by my brief conversation with him. He’ll have had his own reasons, political, religious, and personal, for the course he has chosen to follow. I do believe, though, that he genuinely appreciated the apology I offered him.

Ten things you should never do when you form a group 1.​Work with your friends (they won’t be for long if you do) 2.​Let the singer do his own backing vocals (this is a great opportunity for the band to pull together – ignore it at your peril; see also ‘narcissism’) 3.​Have a couple in the band (they will always conspire against you) 4.​Listen to an A&R man (apart from Pete Tong, everyone I have ever met has been an idiot) 5.​Let your manager open a club/bar (see The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club) 6.​Let the publishing/performance split go unspoken (sort it out as soon as the recording is finished and put it in writing; this is the worst thing you will ever have to do, but the most important, and usually splits most bands before they even start) 7.​Get off the bus (Fatty Molloy did this once and has regretted it ever since) 8.​Think one member is bigger than the group (courtesy Gene Simmons again) 9.​Sign anything that says ‘in perpetuity’ (that means forever, even you won’t live that long) 10.​Let your record company owe you money (see Factory Records) 11.​Ship your gear – always hire (a very famous sub-dance sub-indie outfit once phoned their manager after they’d split and said, ‘Hey, where did all the money go?’ See above!) 12.​Interfere with another group member’s sleep (they will turn very nasty and may call the police) 13.​Interfere with another group member’s girlfriend/wife (this will always end in violence) 14.​Never have a party in your own hotel room (always go to someone else’s) . . . Oh shit, way too many. I’ll stop now.

No, not that airy-fairy, eternal bliss, end-of-all-suffering, bullshitty kind of enlightenment. On the contrary, I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

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Go, because it does not serve you to live beneath the weight of all the lives you could have lived. Go, because if a dream still lingers within you year after year, it is not an escape, it is a calling. Go, because if you get to the end only to discover you preferred where you were at the beginning, the doors never close on the places destined for us. If it's truly for you, it will always be waiting. It will be a homecoming, one way or another. Go, because one day you won't have the time left. Go, because there will always be another reason not to. Go, because while you can measure everything you might lose, you cannot yet see all you may gain. Go, because everything beautiful and secure that exists around you right now is simply proof of what you're capable of creating, not a singular moment of goodness that will never exist again. Go, because anything that pulls you is worth pursuing. Go, because there is nothing more risky than ending this story with a heart full of regrets.

I analysed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and after the crime." "Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but... it was not that part of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can... that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them." Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his idea. "What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the influence of environment?" Razumihin inquired with some alarm even. "No, not exactly because of it," answered Porfiry. "In his article all men are divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary.' Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don't you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?" "What do you mean? That can't be right?" Razumihin muttered in bewilderment. Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge. "That wasn't quite my contention," he began simply and modestly. "Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so." (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) "The only difference is that I don't contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).

My mother herself worked in a bank after she finished, quit to get married, and raised three children, but always regretted that she had not gone to law school. Her decision to go when I was seven—I was the youngest of her three—became the defining event of my childhood. She inquired at Yale, where a man told her, “I wouldn’t let my wife go to law school.” She ended up instead at Pace University.

Imprisonment gives off an unpleasant smell. Remnants of macerating evil thoughts, the effluvia of dirty ideas that have been hanging around too long, the bitter whiff of old regrets. Fresh air, by definition, never enters here. We breathe in our own breath in this bell jar, we share the atmosphere shot through with shards off brown chicken and dark intentions. Our clothes, our sheets and our skin end up saturated with these fumes, and there is no getting used to them. When we return from the exercise yard, and the outside air is halted at the turnstiles, the transition is always sudden, and the vague nausea is there to remind us that we live and breathe in a belly pushing us along in its laborious digestion, and then, when the time comes, it will expel us to free itself, not to give us back our freedom.

I love you, Blue. I loved you then, I love you now, I’ll love you tomorrow even if I’m no longer on this earth. No time exists where I won’t love you.” “Lance, please don’t say goodbye,” my words caught in my throat as pain burrowed into my core. “I have to,” he rasped. “Just in case. I’m so fucking sorry for everything I did to you. To us. I ruined everything. And I know it can’t be fixed. That I made it nearly impossible for you to trust me when we first met, and when you finally did and I earned your heart, I broke that trust irreversibly.” “Maybe it was always meant to be this way,” I said heavily, my chest tight. “You wouldn’t have accessed the diary if you hadn’t gone to prison. Your father knew that. It was where you had to end up for us to get the Imperial Star.” “But it cost me you,” he said, his tone full of loss and regret. I clutched his hand harder as tears spilled down my cheeks, accepting that I had to open my heart one last time, because I may never get a chance to do it again. “Lance,” I said, my voice breaking, shattering. His words were the sweetest poison, tailor made to kill me. I wiped my tears away and summoned the courage to tell him what needed to be said, but then the sound of a door opening reached us and heavy footsteps pounded this way.

That is why, reflecting on that nauseating possible future, I am so grateful to Gorbachev for having done away with it. Not that meant to. He goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for...He overlooked the fact that inviting everyone into the garden would not lead to deferential discussion with an elite, full of allusive hints and skirting around contentious matters. On the contrary, realizing that they now could speak out without getting beaten up, the denizens of the basement would climb up to the roof en masse and state bluntly that they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. The weight of their words, the reverberation of their stamping boots, and the indignation in their hearts would make everything come tumbling down. I didn't regret that in the slightest. After all, what had I lost? Russia, my country, was still there. I still had my language, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moscow and Kazan and Rostov. The army was still there, and the state. Even the bureaucrats were still where they had been. Kiev, Tallinn, and Riga did not vanish into thin air. Everything was as it had been. You could go to those cities if you wanted to. What had changed was that now you had a choice, you had freedom. What remains of that freedom in Putin's Russia today, which is trying to pretend it is the U.S.S.R., is in fact much more than there was then. You can now choose your profession, where you want to live, and your lifestyle. You no longer have to tie yourself in knots in a competition to see who can be the more two-faced in order to be allowed a trip abroad. You can just buy a ticket and go. At this point someone almost always says, "Only nowadays you have to have enough money," and then reminisces about the social guarantees and equality in the U.S.S.R. In reality there was nothing of the sort. The social gulf between a collective farm worker and a member of the regional Communist Party committee was no less than the gulf we have now between an oligarch and one of today's many average workers. Housing and cars were, by an order of magnitude, less accessible than they are today. Sure, many people received accommodation for free, but to get it they had to wait twenty years. Of course, there is a huge difference in the ceilings for luxury and wealth then and now. In the U.S.S.R. the ceiling was on the first floor of a dacha in the "writers' village" outside Moscow. Now there is no ceiling; it has disappeared unimaginably far away, bursting through the roofs of French chalets and skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park in New York. That, of course, is annoying But it does not alter the indisputable fact that although the mass of the population might indeed have been moved by grim tectonics, as Tolstoy would have it, it was nevertheless Gorbachev who started patching something up, but in the end hammered a nail in the wrong way and everything fell down. On its ruins, everyone was given the chance to live a decent life without the perpetual lying and hypocrisy. If, of course, they wanted it.