Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Perry

Regret does its sharpest work when it arrives as a bookkeeping question. Perry frames the moral failure not as a single bad call but as an accumulating loss: how many chances at decency did I misplace because I liked my categories more than my curiosity? The line’s force comes from its quiet arithmetic. “How often” widens the radius from one awkward moment to a life pattern, suggesting that prejudice isn’t just cruelty; it’s a kind of self-imposed deprivation.

The phrasing does something sly with agency. “I may have missed” is gentler than “I harmed,” yet it still indicts: the speaker isn’t confessing to open hostility so much as to a lazy sorting mechanism. “Pre-judged” is the hinge word, a reminder that the verdict arrived before the evidence. And “based on the differences” refuses to name which differences, letting the reader supply their own: class, race, religion, politics, temperament. That openness is strategic; it makes the quote harder to quarantine as someone else’s problem.

As a novelist, Perry is working the terrain of character - the way people are never just their worst moment, and the way societies train us to read “otherness” as danger. The subtext is that goodness is often quiet, coded in unfamiliar manners, and you don’t perceive it if you only know how to scan for your own reflection. It’s less a sermon about tolerance than a prompt about perception: the tragedy of prejudice is not only what it does to others, but how it narrows the human story you’re capable of seeing.