Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

When you're going over periods of your life, you remember certain things, certain events, certain people that you've forgotten. You've forgotten certain lessons or people you were very close to, and then you haven't seen them in a while. I think if you can go through life with the correct regrets, then looking back on it, like I did, a certain portion of my life is pretty enjoyable. All my regrets are ones that I'd like to keep.

I liked being a teenager, but I would not go back for all the tea in China.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

I've had a long life and a lot of relationships and not one of them do I wish - well, I take that back - there are a couple I could have done without.

Some people say, I'd give anything to be 30 again. Well, I really wouldn't. I didn't enjoy being 30.

I'm sure once my career's over, when I look back when I'm older, I can maybe appreciate it a little bit more.

You don't get old until you replace dreams with regrets.

I wish my school days could have dragged on a little longer, or that I could go back and do it later in life.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.

Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?

When a significant other - a spouse, a parent or someone you're close to - is dying, it forces you to think about your life, about what you feel about death. What I realized from my dad's dying was that I wasn't scared of dying. But I was terrified of regrets. I was terrified of getting to the end of my life with a lot of Why didn't I's.

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

Once upon a time I would’ve leaped at the rare opportunity of curling up with Mom on the couch. But now it sort of felt like too little too late. I had someone else waiting for me.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

How many on their deathbeds wished they'd spent more time at the office - or watching TV? The answer is, No one.

ʺYour hair was beautiful too. All of you. You were amazing when we first met, and somehow, inexplicably, youʹve come even farther. Youʹve always been pure, raw energy, and now you control it. Youʹre the most amazing woman Iʹve ever met, and Iʹm glad to have had that love for you in my life. I regret losing it.ʺ He grew pensive. ʺI would give anything—anything—in the world to go back and change history. To run into your arms after Lissa brought me back. To have a life with you. Itʹs too late, of course, but Iʹve accepted it.ʺ

Your greatest regret at the end of your life will be the lions you didn't chase. You will look back longingly on risks not taken, opportunities not seized, and dreams not pursued. Stop running away from what scares you most and start chasing the God-ordained opportunities that cross your path.

There is nothing for you to go back and live over, or fix, or feel regret about now. Every part of your life has unfolded just right. And so - now - knowing all that you know from where you now stand, now what do you want? The answers are now coming forth to you. Go forth in joy, and get on with it.

If you leave, we lose and our pasts win.

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.