Top 100 Could Not Quotes
#1. Nations could not return to their settled an independent life again without noticing that they had unconsciously adopted, and come to feel here and there previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#2. I knew now: there would be no damnation that I did not forge for myself, and no fall so great that it could be without hope.
M. King
#3. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.
Meghan Daum
#4. 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
#5. Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a 'maybe,' a 'possibility.' But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts.
Carrie Brownstein
#6. It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.
Mark Twain
#7. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.
Mark Twain
#8. If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the world if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could possibly marry.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#9. Oh, could slavery exist long if it did not sit on a commercial throne?
Frances Harper
#10. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.
Louise Bourgeois
#11. Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
Katharine Hepburn
#12. Why,' said he, 'does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?
Alexandre Dumas
#13. Spar felt a tiny thud on the back of his shin, as if a moth had butted against him on its flight through the night air. Wait, had that been the small human? Had she kicked him? He could not tell by glancing at her face.
Christine Warren
#14. 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
#15. I knew I must not join him, but how could I tell that to the one who taught me how to live?
Stephen Smith
#16. So could we please not mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?
Rachel Vincent
#17. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he'd thought much about them at the time.
Margaret Atwood
#18. If I had the pen of Moliere, I could make him comic. That is the role of art, is it not? To make monsters comic, so we can bear them, and our own cheap griefs into grand tragedy, so that others will weep with us.
Judith Merkle Riley
#19. Our western mind lacking all culture in this respect, has never yet devised a concept, not even a name for "the union of opposites through the middle path", that most fundamental item of inward experience which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.
Carl Jung
#20. My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
Sam Harris
#21. When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.
This made her rare. This made her precious.
This made him ... love her.
J.R. Ward
#22. I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed - although I did not often make use of the fact - that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.
Alan Bradley
#23. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#24. When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#25. I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Etgar Keret
#26. Only in California could the night air be lit not by fireflies, but radioactive porn star cumshots.
C.Z. Hazard
#27. I could have probably gone on and still played the part of the guitar player of Limp Bizkit, but musically I was kind of bored. If I was to continue, it would have been about the money and not about the true music, and I don't want to lie to myself, or to them or to fans of Limp Bizkit.
Wes Borland
#28. I'm not pretty. The truth is I didn't think I could be a model at all. I was looking at some of the guys on the walls at Irene Marie and I thought to myself 'Jesus Christ. I can't do this. I don't look anything like these guys'.
Channing Tatum
#29. To primitive man, the sky was wonderful, mysterious and awesome, but he could not even dream of what was within the golden disk or silver points of light so far beyond his reach.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#30. I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.
Olivia Sudjic
#32. Unfortunately, we don't have the option of marriage in our country. We could go to Britain or Spain or Argentina and do something symbolic, but that's not what I want. I want to have the rights of anybody else in my home country. I don't want to be a second-class citizen
Dick Cheney
#33. I've always felt a kinship with Willy Wonka. Even at that age, I could tell that he was a flawed hero, an icon for the forbidden. The forbidden in this case was chocolate, a metaphor for indulgence and anything you're not supposed to have, be it sex, drugs, alcohol or pornography.
Marilyn Manson
#34. I had started working in television but it did not pay that much. I was 27, renting this little one-bed flat in Shepherd's Bush, West London, with a bathroom so small only someone of my size could actually get in it.
Anthea Turner
#35. There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.
Bomar
Kurt Vonnegut
#36. For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
Sydney Pollack
#37. Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden.
Selena Kitt
#38. The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
Milton Friedman
#39. Some would know
Why I so
Long still doe tarry,
And ask why
Here that I
Live, and not marry?
Thus I those
Doe oppose;
What man would be here,
Slave to Thrall,
If at all
He could live free here?
Robert Herrick
#40. Do I wish I could retire? Sure, but that's not life.
Carnie Wilson
#41. There was a part of him (her) that dreamed, and he (she) was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#42. If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but ... to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.
Grace Hopper
#43. Could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed
Orson Scott Card
#44. A man can't pass on, like a mother could, an awareness of your body, or sensuality, or what it means to be a woman. I was never taught what femininity was. I learnt it - or rather I invented it - on my own. I tended not to talk at all, if people were staring at me.
Carole Bouquet
#45. The Germanic invasions in the West could not and did not in any way alter this state of affairs.
Henri Pirenne
#46. I could fuck you or kill you and not care about either
T.C. McCarthy
#47. She promised herself that from now on she would try to sit as close to Neal as possible. She could not kick someone eight chairs away.
Tamora Pierce
#48. He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.
E. M. Forster
#49. All of us just want to help you. You're not alone."
Christin didn't say anything but Eddie could sense his acquiescence by the dip of his head, the slight relaxing of his shoulders. Eddie patted his hand.
"We are more than our experiences. We are the sum of them, and more." He said.
Micaela Vee
#50. You could touch for a couple of bucks. The window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. They might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. Some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. Me, I just like the feel.
Sam Lipsyte
#51. But Eva was not dead, he was not allowed to grieve. And she was not alive, so he could not hope. Nothing.
John Ajvide Lindqvist
#52. Man was not then considered a good goldsmith unless he could draw well.
Giorgio Vasari
#53. We shouldn't be doing this."
"Why," he asked, "should we not be dancing?"
"It's not real."
"It could be.
Chloe Neill
#54. One of the best things Dr. G. told me was that I didn't have to judge every new situation I encountered. Living alone, for example. She said I didn't have to say that living alone was good or bad, I could just live alone and not make a judgement on it.
Natalie Taylor
#55. As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County School system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.
Harper Lee
#56. I use different kinds of materials on different kinds of projects. Today we can do things with steel and glass that we could not do before. flexible enough to change.
Gottfried Bohm
#57. His charms worked, for though the bullets flicked close none hit him. He was the tiger of Mysore, he could not die, only kill.
Bernard Cornwell
#58. She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her,
Leo Tolstoy
#59. If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.
Karl Kraus
#60. As my men could profitably employ themselves on these streams, I moved slowly along, averaging not more than five or six miles per day and sometimes remained two days at the same encampment.
William Henry Ashley
#61. Drinking her away will not bring her back to you, Simon."
"You could be right, dad, but at least I won't be able to feel anything.
Mary A. Wasowski
#62. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me? As
Bell Hooks
#63. If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated suffering.
Adoniram Judson
#64. There never was a liar that had not a spot in him where he could not help admiring truth.
Henry Ward Beecher
#65. If only i could get that under control then i feel like i could stay here a long time, watching the days leaking into the nights, swilling over the buildings, bleeding back again.
I could lie and not think of anything but ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light.
Gwendoline Riley
#66. Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.
Samuel Rogers
#67. The worst thing that could happen is that we hold back and play tentative because we "fear" disappointment. If we cannot accept the possibility we might fail, we most certainly are not prepared to succeed.
Mike Margolies
#68. One-act [plays] are not strikingly remunerative, but, on the other hand, the veriest dullard could not spend more than a week in writing one.
Arnold Bennett
#69. One must simply take the days of their lives as they happen. If you spend time worrying over what is to come, which may or may not happen, then you will only be wasting precious days you will wish in the future you could have cherished a bit longer.
R.J. Gonzales
#70. We could also say that there is only one real kind of poverty: not living as children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ.
Pope Francis
#71. I could be hit by a Sara Lee truck tomorrow. Which is not a bad way of going: 'Richard Simmons Found in a Freeway in Pound Cake and Fudge, With a Smile on His Face.' Let's face it. We don't know anything.
Richard Simmons
#72. I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
Robert Cormier
#73. Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.
Arthur Miller
#74. Even forgiveness, if weak and passive, is not true: fight is better. Forgive when you could bring legions of angels to the victory.
Swami Vivekananda
#75. That useful alterations will be suggested by experience, could not but be foreseen ... It moreover equally enables the general and state governments to originate the amendment of errors as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side or on the other.
James Madison
#76. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).
Daniel J. Levitin
#77. I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#78. Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
John Steinbeck
#79. It is not more than you can handle. It is merely more than you thought you could do.
Laura Breckenridge
#80. This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.
Lydia Davis
#81. True, it would not be a new venture for him. But need it be? Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before?
Amor Towles
#82. Without darkness, we may never know how bright the stars shine. Without battles, we could not know what victory feels like. Without adversity, we may never appreciate the abundance in our lives. Be thankful, not only for the easy times, but for every experience that has made you who you are.
Julie-Anne
#83. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.
Yukio Mishima
#84. She was wonderful; no mother could have been more wonderful. But ever after, she demanded that I should not forget it, nor cease to be grateful, nor hold an opinion different from her own, nor even, as I grew older, feel the need for any companionship but hers.
Rosemary Sutcliff
#85. Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly.
Gordon Dahlquist
#86. There was a wildness inside him; someday he would capture it. Not to be tamed, but to be released. For only by understanding his mind could it be freed.
Daniel J. Rice
#87. You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.
Geoffrey S. Fletcher
#88. I can't shake the feeling that Parker just told me goodbye. Not goodbye to our friendship, because that will always be there in some capacity. But goodbye to the way we used to be. The way we could have been.
Lauren Layne
#89. But to my questions he gave replies so vague that one could not tell whether they came from the mountains or the sea.
Soseki Natsume
#90. Lee on the other hand was not asexual. He might think of me as his little sister and could calmly sleep next to me without his nipples getting hard (or anything else getting hard for that matter) but I was pretty certain I could not do the same.
Kristen Ashley
#91. The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!
Henry Hazlitt
#92. While Frazier was a man of few words / Ali was a world of mouth / but he found his place in history / Now his heart can express him well / Joe Frazier was a silent warrior / whom Ali silently admired / One could not rise without the other
Muhammad Ali
#93. And so what moved him onward and down the office building's stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic.
Neal Stephenson
#94. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#95. Connor:I let her go. I could have held on but I let her go.
The Monster:And that is the truth.
Connor:I didn't mean it, though! I didn't mean to let her go! And now it's for real! Now she's going to die and it's my fault!
The Monster:And that is not the truth at all.
Patrick Ness
#96. You're a peach full of poison, you know that? Mosca snapped back, but could not quite keep a hint of admiration from her tone.
Frances Hardinge
#97. Luggage and guests did not travel together ... in fact, luggage went by a different route, so suitcases could be distributed to guest rooms before they arrived
Estella M. Chung
#98. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world.
Orson Scott Card
#99. I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn't loved, I wasn't free, and I wasn't safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.
Yeonmi Park
#100. We knew our Father. There was no need for persuasion. Would not His Fatherliness be longing to give us our hearts' desire (if I may put it so)? How could we press Him as though He were not our own most loving Father?
Amy Carmichael
