Tom Petty Quotes

I can't even say what my greatest fear is because I, I can't even imagine. Being without my family... I can't even say it because it makes me cry.

When my stepfather died, I just kind of fell apart. I felt pretty vulnerable, like there literally could be no tomorrow.

When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.

After I got over the terrible pain of having something of mine taken from me, I began to think how bad everybody else must be feeling. It wasn't a nice time.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

I've been to those places where it's 'poor, pitiful me.'

Some things you just don't get over.

Victims always feel alone and helpless.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.

Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.

I screamed and cried, but no one ever came. No doubt it was in one of those scream-filled nights in which my strong singer lungs and my crazy voice were born.

Even close people left me - I was hurt by them and felt there was nobody who understands me, which made me fall apart.

After losing Steve, it does kind of feel like I'm free-falling.

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

There is hurt that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetrybecause no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.

there is nothing to be done. only accept it... and hurt.

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

That was the one thing about the rain that likened it to sorrow: You did your best to remain untouched, safe and dry, but if and when you failed, there came a point in which you started seeing the problem less in terms of drops than as an incessant gush, and thereby you decide you might as well get drenched.

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

You yourself are to blame. This weeping and wailing and knocking your heads into corners [against brick walls, as it were] will not do you the least good.