Tom Petty Quotes

I think that my regrets mostly have to do with my relationship with my ex-girlfriend. Every once in a while, you get those flashback memories of conversations you had with your exes, and you just, like, wince when you're walking down the street. Something occurs to you, 'Oh, no, I said that.'

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.

I don't want to live the rest of my life thinking about you and dreaming of what might have been. Stay with me, Allie.

Though I know he loves me, tonight my heart is sad; his kiss was not so wonderful as all the dreams I had.

People have let me down in the past. I've loved something, and it's become a disgrace. I'd rather start again.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

Say goodbye to yesterday...those are the words I'll never say.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

Regrets are so far from reality.

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way; I'll not be left in sorrow. So long as I have yesterday, Go take your damned tomorrow!

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

You were everything, everything that I wanted. We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it. And all of the memories, so close to me, just fade away. All this time you were pretending. So much for my happy ending.

... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.

It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.

And I've been walking 'round with memories way too long.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

Some people will always be disappointed.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.