George Jean Nathan Quotes

Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.

Regret is a tricky word. Here's a big secret: nobody knows what wasn't.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

It is always awfully easy to say what she would have done after you haven’t done it

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

Remorse is memory awake.

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.

The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

Regret is the most tiresome of companions.

What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And [he] thought he had the answer. Regret. Regret for things said, things done, and things not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

You always think "woulda, coulda, shoulda." I wish that I had prosecuted Tot Mom, I wish I'd prosecuted OJ, and I wish I had prosecuted the JonBenet Ramsey case.

This was our common ground, the secret we shared but never spoke aloud. I should have been with him; she should have left him alone. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

What if you were really meant to be with someone? But you kept messing about and having the Horn and so on and you lost them.

Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different.

I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out.

I fear looking back and wishing I had done things I hadn't.

Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.

I got offered that role in Transamerica that Felicity Huffman did. That was a part that I was like, "Well, maybe I should've done that." I'm at peace with it, but that is one thing that I did turn down that went on to do great things for her. I wonder what would've happened if I would've done that.

It's the things you don't do, not the things you do, you feel most sorry for.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.