Had Been Quotes

#1. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.

Jeanette Winterson

#2. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#3. The day had been a slowly closing door. The rest of the world moved on out into the stream of life, while I was left stranded and forgotten on the riverbank, at low tide.

Lia Mills

#4. Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.

Marcus Sakey

#5. Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?

Amos Bronson Alcott

#6. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

#7. If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#8. [A]ll her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.

Georges Bernanos

#9. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )

Italo Calvino

#10. My greatest gift in life was being dyslexic. It made me special. It made me different. If I had not been dyslexic, I wouldn't have needed sports.

Caitlyn Jenner

#11. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Joe Haldeman

#12. 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

#13. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.

Paulo Coelho

#14. I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.

Sigrid Undset

#15. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.

Don DeLillo

#16. I gave a silent prayer of thanks that I didn't seem to be lousy. I had probably been too filthy for any self-respecting louse to take up residence.

Patrick Rothfuss

#17. I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.

Gene Wolfe

#18. At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.

John Gould

#19. Then you go ahead and cry, " Will said.

That ended my weeping. Had he asked me not to cry, I would not have been able to stop, but his permission somehow quit my tears.

Kathleen Grissom

#20. I convinced my parents to let me see an agent, but because I had been taught never to speak to strangers, I was so quiet during the interview, they said to bring me back when I was older.

Jason Fuchs

#21. For months she had been everywhere, now she was nowhere.

Jerry Spinelli

#22. From the moment she'd first seen him in the Fontaine ballroom, she'd been lost. The passionate kiss a week later had destroyed her. Even now she could feel the heat of his expert lips against hers, and the remembrance of his taste made her mouth water.

Sylvia Day

#23. Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.

George Orwell

#24. I feel as if I had been born dead under
American bombardment.

Stefan Bolea

#25. When I had first been hurled into the world of the 1970s I had thought I found Utopia. And now I was discovering that it was only a Utopia for some. Shaw wanted a Utopia which would exist for all.

Michael Moorcock

#26. Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.

Upton Sinclair

#27. Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years.

Nicholas Sparks

#28. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.

Sarah Vowell

#29. 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

#30. He got the impression she might be a bit fucked up, but that had always been his type. The kind that would break your headlights, egg your house, spray paint ASSHOLE on your garage door.

C.D. Breadner

#31. I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.

Jerry Spinelli

#32. And suddenly I felt completely strange, like the distance between us was much much greater than what I could see from where I was standing. Like that line, always so clear to me, had somehow shifted, or never even been where I'd thought it was at all.

Sarah Dessen

#33. He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

Steven Erikson

#34. Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#35. I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

William, Saroyan

#36. Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.

Charles Kingsley

#37. Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison.

Hank Azaria

#38. I tried to show him that he was the answer to a question I hadn't even known I had been asking.

Jojo Moyes

#39. My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

#40. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

James Baldwin

#41. Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

Oscar Wilde

#42. The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who'd been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead.

Ben Aaronovitch

#43. One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Colson Whitehead

#44. The purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern. I dubbed it, 'The church of freedom from concern,' or 'FFC.

Jim Carrey

#45. My main goal, starting out as a young actor, was to carry the reins that Pac left off and to reach the depths as an actor that I know he would have reached had he still been here with us.

Michael K. Williams

#46. If Pete Simmons had been twenty, he might have asked a lot of bullshit questions that didn't matter.

Stephen King

#47. The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. "The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me," I say to Catherine.
"Yes, Mom." she says, "I know, Your memories are my memories now.

Abigail Thomas

#48. Jessie Wallace was the first time I erupted. She was late, she was young. She's not like that any more. I lost my temper. It was silly and I burst into tears and ran up to the producer. I said I had been terrible and amateur.

Barbara Windsor

#49. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no personal computers.

Jimmy Maher

#50. My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

Brad Thor

#51. He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.

Mark Twain

#52. I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it.

Gloria Reuben

#53. In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization.

Edward Grey

#54. It had been too long since she'd had some hot sex. She wasn't looking for a relationship. No, a one night stand was what she wanted. Anonymous sex with a handsome cowboy that she would never have to see again.

Tamara Hoffa

#55. He kissed her as though he were starved for her. Like he'd been held away from her and had finally broken free. It was the kind of kiss that lived only in her fantasies. No one had ever made her feel so..consumed.

Maya Banks

#56. Sylvie wishes the anti-depressants had been around when she was in her early twenties, not only to rescue her from the dark tunnels that came when her brother first got sick, but also to keep her from fucking all those assholes.

Francesca Lia Block

#57. London had been a dream, one I promised I would indulge when I graduated university and made something of myself.

Chanel Cleeton

#58. Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

William Gibson

#59. If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

Andy Borowitz

#60. She stopped, and he knew she had caught herself, dismayed a what she had been about to reveal. [Nicole Dubois]

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#61. He had been diagnosed as suffering from atypical schizophrenia. Lord, how he hated that awful-sounding label. It conjured up visions of some deranged maniac escaped from a secure mental hospital.

Etienne De L'Amour

#62. It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn't imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#63. They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Claes Oldenburg

#64. Are ideals confined to this deformed experiment upon a noble purpose, tainted, as it is, with bargains and tied to a peace treaty which might have been disposed of long ago to the great benefit of the world if it had not been compelled to carry this rider on its back?

Henry Cabot Lodge

#65. You are what you think. Before you succeed physically, it had been done mentally. The hometown of both victory and defeat is the mind of a person.

Israelmore Ayivor

#66. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children, and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.

Kurt Vonnegut

#67. For I am verily persuaded the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ; and the reason why congregations have been so dead is, because they have had dead men preaching to them.

Gilbert Tennent

#68. 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

#69. He'd once had a religious conviction, but had been acquitted through lack of evidence.

Nigel Cole

#70. THE MAGICIAN
They asked St. Germain's manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.

'How would I know?" the man replied. "I have only been in the master's employ for three hundred years.

Neil Gaiman

#71. I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ...

Gertrude B. Elion

#72. The man he'd once been wasn't a collection of personality traits. He was the things he knew, the desires of his heart, the skills he had.

James S.A. Corey

#73. But what was possible or practical had been replaced by a far baser impulse. Hope.

Ted Dekker

#74. 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

#75. I didn't do anything for two years but work on 'Gone Baby Gone,' and it was miserable and hard, but at the end? It is a good movie. I liked it very much. If it had been dismissed and deemed worthless, it would been definitely devastating. But that didn't happen.

Ben Affleck

#76. 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

#77. History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilised, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.

Tariq Ramadan

#78. Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

Graham Greene

#79. I really have been lucky because I've always had a very healthy attitude to my body.

Lily James

#80. I had been searching for truth, but it is strange to say that as long as the searcher was there, truth was not found. And when the truth was found, I looked all around ... I was absent. When the truth was found, the seeker was no more; and when the seeker was, truth was nowhere.

Osho

#81. I don't shave," she interjected, stopping my train of thought again. "You don't shave?" I asked, my eyes traveling to her bare legs. "No." "Ever?" I asked inanely. Her legs had been smooth when I took off her sandal last night. "Yes, ever," Layna answered. "Everywhere?

Libby Austin

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

Albert Ellis

#83. Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?

Bianca Jagger

#84. I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did - thank God I did.

Charlie Daniels

#85. The two had been together since they were little girls, and so loved and hated each other like sisters.

Christopher Moore

#86. I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play.

Dick Van Dyke

#87. But to give him anything to drink was impossible, or would have been so had not the landlord bored a reed, and putting one end in his mouth poured the wine into him through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever the ribbons of his helmet.

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

#88. I never met anyone who gets up out of their bed after a night on the town and says, 'Oh I wish I'd had another drink last night. That would have been a great idea

Arthur Mathews

#89. 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

#90. The equator was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it.

Mark Twain

#91. I had to marry a Greek; I had to stir up the ethnic pot. Otherwise, my children would have been anemic and sickly. Now they've got some good Mediterranean blood in them.

Alexandra Wentworth

#92. I was a twenty-two-year-old single white female alone in a strange country where my sister had been killed.

Karen Marie Moning

#93. Klaus, and Sunny had been many, many times to Mr. Poe's office at the bank, where he coughed and talked on the phone and made decisions

Lemony Snicket

#94. I suspect that had my dad not been president, he'd be asking the same questions: How'd your meeting go with so-and-so? . How did you feel when you stood up in front of the people for the State of the Union Address-state of the budget address, whatever you call it.

George W. Bush

#95. She did not delude herself into expecting Francis to love her. He had never been taught how to love, but had an arresting way of looking pleased at Adah's achievements.

Buchi Emecheta

#96. I always liked film as a teaching tool - a way of getting exposed to ideas that had never been presented to me. It just wasn't on the list of career options where I grew up.

Brad Pitt

#97. I actually had to get two fillings. Yeah, I swear. My teeth had been bugging me because I had been eating so much junk food on the road. I was the worst on teh team because I always had a bag of candy with me. I never had any cavities before, but yesterday, I took two for the team.

Tisha Venturini

#98. Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a 'bionic face,' why didn't they do a better job of it?

Jack Palance

#99. I've actually been asked once or twice if I had some Puerto Rican in me.

Grey Damon

#100. That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.

Sloan Wilson