“After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t; but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back.”
“Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he’d start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. Nobody knew when he’d go off, but at some point everybody knew he would. Again, and again, and again.”
″‘Why should I make you new feet? To enable you to escape again from home?’
‘I promise you,’ said the puppet, sobbing, ‘that for the future I will be good.’
‘All boys,’ replied Geppetto, ‘when they are bent upon obtaining something, say the same thing.’
‘I promise you that I will go to school, and that I will study and earn a good character.‘”
“We are instructed to write down not just our deeds but our feelings, because it must be known that we do have feelings. Remorse. Regret. Sorrow too great to bear. Because if we didn’t feel those things, what monsters would we be?”
“Horatio is so human - young, intelligent, strategic, flawed yet without much time for remorse and self pity. He is a wonderful protagonist and has met his match ...”
It would be true enough to say I am sorry, because I am sorry now. I wasn’t a bit sorry last night. I was mad clear through, and I stayed mad all night. I know I did because I woke up three times and I was just furious every time. But this morning it was over. I wasn’t in a temper anymore—and it left a dreadful sort of goneness, too. I felt so ashamed of myself.
“With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave.”
“Are you sure she is safe?” whispered Jo, looking remorsefully at the golden head, which might have been swept away from her sight forever under the treacherous ice.
“This is strange,” returned Monte Cristo, seeming to yield to his reflections, “that you should find yourself without any preparation in a house where the event happened that causes you so much remorse.”
The fowl was tender, the wine old, the fire clear and sparkling, and Andrea was surprised to find himself eating with as good an appetite as though nothing had happened. Then he went to bed and almost immediately fell into that deep sleep which is sure to visit men of twenty years of age, even when they are torn with remorse. Now, here we are obliged to own that Andrea ought to have felt remorse, but that he did not.
The minutes passed; Madame de Villefort could not drop the curtain which she held like a funeral pall over the head of Valentine. She was lost in reverie, and the reverie of crime is remorse.
“Oh, second father,” he exclaimed, “thou who hast given me liberty, knowledge, riches; thou who, like beings of a superior order to ourselves, couldst understand the science of good and evil; if in the depths of the tomb there still remain something within us which can respond to the voice of those who are left on earth; if after death the soul ever revisit the places where we have lived and suffered,—then, noble heart, sublime soul, then I conjure thee by the paternal love thou didst bear me, by the filial obedience I vowed to thee, grant me some sign, some revelation! Remove from me the remains of doubt, which, if it change not to conviction, must become remorse!”