David Brin Quotes

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

If I didn't like someone, I wouldn't want him calling me up when I was dying. I wouldn't want them having regrets that they didn't talk to me.

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

We cannot erase what has been done. We can apologize for it. We can express our outrage. We can say to the American people and to the people of the world, this is not our way and we do not condone it, but we cannot change it and we cannot erase it.

People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late.

Nobody wants an apology letter 14 years later.

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

I think you always have regrets.

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

The dead can't change, but you can.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.

My greatest regret is that my mother died before I could help her materially.

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

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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

I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all of our lives.

By the way, I haven't heard an 'I'm sorry' from you yet." My sense of grievance had overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation. I am sorry that the maenad picked on you." I glared at him. "Not enough," I said. I was trying hard to hang on to this conversation. Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me." That's more like it.

You can't change what you don't acknowledge.

Death is just a change in lifestyles.

Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions.

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

How he lies in his rights of a man! Death has done all death can. And absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry.

For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.