Could Have Quotes

#1. Early in my business career I learned the folly of worrying about anything. I have always worked as hard as I could, but when a thing went wrong and could not be righted, I dismissed it from my mind.

Julius Rosenwald

#2. I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more?

Tom Hanks

#3. When you look back from your Olympic experience, you never want to question whether you could have done more. The one thing you can control is your off-ice preparation.

Angela Ruggiero

#4. something glorious a minute later. How could anyone not have an orgasm? While she didn't ask for his cock, her mouth opened as she gulped in air. Perhaps it was when she dropped her head back that he understood she was ever so close, because he shut off the vibrator and pulled it out.

Vella Day

#5. Sometimes not having any idea where we're going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

Ann Patchett

#6. I was kicked off a record label and didn't get picked up again. It was devastating at first because I thought, 'Oh my God. My career is over. What's gonna happen? What am I going to do?' Once I got that I could have a career, a very good career, without having a hit record, then I changed.

Thelma Houston

#7. Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.

Samuel Beckett

#8. The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.

Simon Conway Morris

#9. Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Winston Churchill

#10. Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.

Khaled Hosseini

#11. Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.

Ernest Hemingway,

#12. I could have closed down bits of British Home Stores to make more money but it's not my style. I want to make my money as a retailer, not by putting people out of work.

Philip Green

#13. I was very compelled by a woman who would choose this profession. She [Maura Isles] came from a very highly-educated, wealthy background and could have chosen to do a lot of other things, and has this uber-feminine, modern woman mentality, but works this job.

Sasha Alexander

#14. I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened ... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.

Alice Sebold

#15. With all the opportunities I had, I could have done more. And if I'd done more, I could have been quite remarkable.

Katharine Hepburn

#16. They just expected it to you know ... Paul, Steve and I could have hired our own publicist, if we wanted to, but I kind of liked the way it was more of a cult thing and those that liked it, liked it, you know what I mean?

Amy Sedaris

#17. I am a professional liar. I am two people. I take pleasure in experimenting with people's emotions, people who trust me, putting their understanding of me in doubt. Basically, I am the best thing that could have happened to you.

A.M. Bakalar

#18. I'm not going to hold my breath because life goes on. Life is too short to sit around moaning about what could have been or what was.

Tina Weymouth

#19. For too long nurses have been undervalued, restricted in what they could do, with too few career opportunities in clinical practice. For far too long, nurses have endured a pay system that has held them back - both professionally as well as financially.

John Hutton

#20. You, woman, are without a doubt the most senseless female I could have picked to fall in love with.

Kat Martin

#21. When we hold hands, it seems as if our blood flows together. We could kiss forever if we didn't have to go to school or work.

Gary Chapman

#22. When I received the news of the Nobel Peace Award, I could not believe it. I told my father, 'I think they have the wrong name, Dad. Please, can you talk to this man on the phone? I'm busy cooking!'

Betty Williams

#23. I could not be more determined and robust about this. I want more children to play cricket and to have the chance to compete. I want them playing on the correct pitches with hard balls and proper headgear.

Tessa Jowell

#24. But you hardley even know him"she said."He could be a serial killer"
"I did have that thought.I checked the apartment out,but if his got an ice cooler full of arms in it,I havent seen it yet.Anyway he seems pretty since.

Cassandra Clare

#25. They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That's my motto.

Joe R. Lansdale

#26. No other country on earth could have provided such tremendous opportunities and we should never take the privilege of our citizenship for granted.

Jane D. Hull

#27. If we could have somehow stayed away from the public and the press, it might have been different, but every private issue seemed to be played out on the front page.

Marla Maples

#28. It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

Ronald Reagan

#29. My life is great. It's just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been." "You killed your ambition, didn't you?" "It died of natural causes. Of neglect.

Blake Crouch

#30. I confess to you guys, I confess to the church, I know I have backed away from certain things because of my arrogance. I thought I could attract more people to Jesus by hiding certain things about him.

Francis Chan

#31. I could still eat a cheeseburger if I wanted to. I just can't have them every day.

Drew Carey

#32. 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.

Graham Greene

#33. It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Mark Twain

#34. I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. [- Nick Carroway]

F Scott Fitzgerald

#35. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

Rachel Hartman

#36. I could not have done anymore, I had pushed myself to a limit that I had never touched before and that's definitely going to change you - than going out and doing what you do in practice every day.

Elvis Stojko

#37. His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?"
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

Lois Lowry

#38. We all knew where the goop originated and could have defended ourselves, but the origin of the fusillade doubled as the center of the action. Once the baby's scalp protruded, we all hunkered down and braced ourselves.

David Z. Hirsch

#39. I am moving towards being vegan. When I crack an egg now, I look and think could that have become a baby

Heather Mills

#40. We fixate on sins of commission: Don't do this, don't do that - and you're OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it's more hypocrisy than holiness! It's the sins of omission - what you would have, could have, and should have done - that break the heart of your heavenly Father.

Mark Batterson

#41. I spent twenty years of my life trying to recruit people out of local churches and into missions structures so that they could be involved in fulfilling God's global mission. Now I have another idea. Let's take God's global mission and put it right in the middle of the local church!

George H. Miley

#42. How could we have developed our intellectual skills without education?

Lailah Gifty Akita

#43. I miss my dog."
...
"What was his name again?"
"Mouse."
"That was very unkind of you."
"Naming him mouse?"
"Isn't he a greyhound?"
"I could have named hum Turtle."
"Frederick!" ...
"It's better than Frederic," Annabel said, "Good heavens, that's my brother's name.

Julia Quinn

#44. I wish we could make out in your bed."
Noah sighed. "As do I, but I'm afraid we have ritual burning to conduct."
"It's always something."
"Isn't it though?

Michelle Hodkin

#45. That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States. NEW

Isabel Wilkerson

#46. I suppose I might never have known or believed that love could be so strong if I hadn't seen it dragged through this hell. Now I know that love can truly endure anything.

Willow Aster

#47. Anther spasm ripped through me and all I could wonder was why in the world had women been doing this for thousands of years? This was barbaric. This was torture. Never again. Never again as long as I lived would I have another baby, so Beep had better be pretty awesome.

Darynda Jones

#48. You could do a hundred projects and still not have the fans that are there for Twilight.

Kellan Lutz

#49. You could own coins but you couldn't have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.

Carl Andre

#50. You could have knocked me over with Michael Huffington's brain.

Molly Ivins

#51. People that are brilliant and successful, we think they've just always been that way. That's not the case. Most of them have had some tough adversity in their life. It's prepared them. I've never felt like you could develop character without adversity.

Bobby Bowden

#52. What does 'hmm' have to do with anything? Could you ever use more than five words? All this grunting and minced words make you come across - primal."

His smile tipped higher. "Primal."

"You're impossible."

"Me Jev, you Nora.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#53. Eight years ago, I was a waiter, and I didn't have a pot to piss in. And now ... ? It's like I said to my wife: I love the fact that, if I was in a restaurant and Steven Spielberg walked in, I could go up to him and say, 'Hey, mate, how are you?' I think that's pretty amazing, actually.

Nick Frost

#54. Our failure to bag the man-eater up to that date was not due to our having done anything we should not have done, or left undone anything we should have done.It could only be attributed to sheer bad luck.

Jim Corbett

#55. There is no way that I could have survived if I had not changed my style of play.

Willie Lanier

#56. It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he'd decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.

Terry Pratchett

#57. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#58. If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.

Albert Ellis

#59. To be a feminist, you could cut your hair really short. You have to be really angry about something.

Tucker Carlson

#60. There was always one. Every village seemed to have one young woman who believed her beauty could somehow magically protect her from a monster. Somehow, they would be special enough to tame the Beast.
They were always wrong.

Kerrelyn Sparks

#61. Man could not live by darkness alone, one point of light he must have for salvation
one point of light.

Radclyffe Hall

#62. I see the beauty in boxing. It teaches me strength physically, but mostly mentally. I had to learn my strength, because for so long I could have been tougher than I was.

Kelly Rowland

#63. God instituted laws whereby [the Spirits that He would send into the world] could have a privilege to advance life himself.

Joseph Smith Jr.

#64. I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

Stanley Kubrick

#65. If we could just stop building up armies and things like that, we would have all the money we need for wildlife and poverty.

Jane Goodall

#66. There is simply something wrong with my conscience. I do try to wrestle with the devil as I ought, but, like Eve, even when tempted by the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, I succumb. Good as they are, how could my parents have bred a daughter like me?

Miriam Brenaman

#67. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter. (p. 22)

Rabih Alameddine

#68. I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

Bjorn Lomborg

#69. Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

Walter Lippmann

#70. Well, Monsieur Laporte placed her near her Majesty in order that our poor queen might at least have someone in whom she could place confidence, abandoned as she is by the king, watched as she is by the cardinal, betrayed as she is by everybody." "Ah, ah!

Alexandre Dumas

#71. Lyrically, I could be so much sharper. Melodically, I could be so much stickier. Musically, I could have so much more texture. So I'm constantly doing that, trying to find new ways to mix things up.

Pharrell Williams

#72. But define 'completely ridiculous shit,'" Duvall said. "Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don't understand that crap at all. As far as I'm concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.

John Scalzi

#73. I would be delighted if the United States could have a positive relationship with Russia, and I would be thrilled if the Russian people, who are so capable, had a normal country that they could chart a different future.

Hillary Clinton

#74. There I was, clinging to the scraps of happiness that I could finally feel again: coffee and books and an afternoon with my best friend. What right did I have, when he was gone?

Emery Lord

#75. I have a 10 year old boy and a 6 year old boy and the stuff that they watch, it's always ... I mean, it could be because we're a funny family, but they love the humor and combining humor with space action, I mean, you know, there's a winner right there.

Rhys Darby

#76. Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called All the Things That Could Go Wrong.

Marianne Williamson

#77. Neither one of us could be sure we'd get our money back on this investment, but we just wanted to have company of our own for once because we were best friends.

Steve Wozniak

#78. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.

Haruki Murakami

#79. If the enemy could only know that Marcus Garvey is but a John the Baptist in the wilderness, that a greater and more dangerous Marcus Garvey is yet to appear, the Garvey with whom you will have to reckon for the injustice of the present generation.

Marcus Garvey

#80. I want to have the eyes of an adult to see the world as it is, but I more desperately want to have the heart of a child to make certain that I never forget what it could be.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#81. Have four things going. I have stand-up comedy, two television shows and I'm working on a play. I like to work, and I fear that something could fall through. You know what they say: 'The show must go off.'

Joy Behar

#82. He could hear his granny speaking. "No one's too poor to buy soap." Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.

Terry Pratchett

#83. Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart could have recovered greenness?

George Herbert

#84. I know that many, if not most, women would have a problem with my acceptance of what happened with Lara.
The reality is I shall always be grateful to Lara for helping my husband when I could not do so. I couldn't have chosen a better or kinder surrogate.

Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

#85. If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

Austan Goolsbee

#86. But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it. I've just turned 40, I have a son and I feel more settled and driven than ever. I think my 40s will be my most prolific time. It's a very rare life you get to lead as a sitcom guy.

Eric McCormack

#87. In principle if I could not have a home I wouldn't. But not having a home would be too difficult procedurally, going from hotel to hotel, the gap of three hours where you're hungry and tired.

Lee Child

#88. I looked up and she said, "You have to believe I did everything a reasonable person would do. Maybe I didn't reach my hands into toilet water, but I did everything else I could.

Charlie Close

#89. Earlier generations of stars in the galaxy could well have had planets. But really, there was only hydrogen and helium to work with, so they'd all be gas giants and not small, rocky planets.

Jill Tarter

#90. I don't expect too much from the afterlife, I think that I know very well what pain is. When I think of the end of my life, I think mainly: I didn't do nothing, but I could have done more.

Sylvia Kristel

#91. We spend most of our lives striving so hard
to earn our own permission to be at rest
where we are
- when we could have done it all along.

Ivan M. Granger

#92. Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

Edward Albee

#93. Children are touched by heaven - their every breath, every laugh, every touch a sip of water to the desert wanderer. I could not have known this as a child, but I know it as a mother, a truth I learned as my own heart grew, bent, danced, and broke for each of my children

Nadia Hashimi

#94. You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#95. I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

#96. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.

Patricia Cornwell

#97. Burnside was in the best position on the field, could have moved at any time toward a weak defense, a defense that was weaker still

Jeff Shaara

#98. Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

Julia Cameron

#99. All my life I have been honest-comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly-I could only lend it.

Mark Twain

#100. Hacking was the only entertainment that would occupy my mind - like a huge video game, but with real consequences. I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.

Kevin Mitnick