Top 100 Had Been Quotes
#1. And perhaps that was typical of a certain . . . imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and which Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts. Until now.
Ian McEwan
#2. On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness.
Andrew Pyper
#3. People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow.
Zoe Heller
#4. This had been her fantasy for ages. Bound, bruised, and loved by Stephen.
April Vine
#5. I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone's nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.
Paul Watkins
#6. I had been very angry, angry enough to lose control; none of us are above it.
Shania Twain
#7. In past summers when I had been home, I had often tasted a strange sadness as I sat quietly in the midst of the seething cicada song. This sorrow seemed to pierce deep into my heart along with the piercing insect cry. Always at such times I would sit alone and still, gazing into myself.
Soseki Natsume
#8. Amarantha's court had been the work of a child. The Court of Nightmares was the work of a god. While
Sarah J. Maas
#9. Until recently, he had been sustaining a fairly credible cover story about being a peaceful wine merchant in Cradle.
Neal Stephenson
#10. Oh my God you are despicable!" Etta snarled.
"Careful, madam, blasphemy is still a sin-"
Even if Nicholas had been the gambling sort, he never would have wagered a single coin on her next words being "Then I guess I'll see you in hell!
Alexandra Bracken
#11. I had always been a boy in this place, and many of the trees and rocks and streams had been old men when I knew them. Some had died. All had changed. I knew that. I had changed the most.
Dan Groat
#12. If the inspirational calendar had been a person, Gus would have punched it in the face.
T.J. Klune
#13. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?
Albert Camus
#14. My mother always used to say, 'Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God' - that's what she always said. The same God with different names.
Jane Goodall
#15. He had held out shakily, like a tree that had been hacked down to its breaking point. But that kiss was the last swing, the final impact, and he gave in finally, felled.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
#16. nurse woke me at 4:30 a.m. on November 1, 1962, to announce the messiah had been wrapped in swaddling and was christened Anthony Kiedis.
Blackie Dammett
#17. It had been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, and I'd swallowed half the pond in the process, but I'd gotten the gist of it, managed to conquer my blind panic and terror and trust myself.
Sarah J. Maas
#18. I feel that my relationship with Kasparov now is much the same as it had been before the match - good. As for his reaction, well it can't be nice to lose your title after so long, but he was very generous.
Vladimir Kramnik
#19. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.
Maureen F. McHugh
#20. anchored ships and over the shallow bar had been dangerous, but
Neal Stephenson
#21. Their friendship sometimes struck Frances as being like a piece of soap-like a piece of ancient kitchen soap that had got worn to the shape of her hand, but which had been dropped to the floor so many times it was never quite free of its bits of cinder.
Sarah Waters
#22. Mrs Grantly after her father's death. This matter, therefore, had been taken out of the warden's hands
Anthony Trollope
#23. When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.
Dean Jackson
#24. Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.
Susan Orlean
#25. The day you left, it felt like I lost a diary in which I had been writing for so long. Now all that memories flashes in bits and pieces inside my head always and makes me wish that I could sit back and read it all over again.
Akshay Vasu
#26. She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#27. He remembered believing there had been a time when monsters roamed the earth. The brave hearted fought flesh-and-blood dragons instead of shadowboxing their inner demons, the sport of modern man.
Katherine Starbird
#28. It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body.
Charlaine Harris
#29. In his life, after all, he had achieved nothing, had been totally unproductive. He couldn't make anyone else happy, and, of course, couldn't make himself happy. Happiness? He wasn't even sure what that meant.
Haruki Murakami
#30. Surely they had passed the worst. All the luck had been against them, but sooner or later even the worst luck changes.
Stephen King
#31. Uh oh, maybe I'm hysterical. No, the look on his face had been so funny. Did he really think to kiss me into submission? That shit might work in romance novels, but not on me. If he wants to kiss me he'll have to earn that privilege again.
Tamara Hoffa
#32. For years and years and years ... people showed me pictures that had been left unclaimed at big photo-finishers. Sometimes I think it changed my personality, sometimes I wonder if it didn't damage my brain.
Michael Lesy
#33. When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.
Igor Stravinsky
#34. She had been lost on her own and I had been lost on my own, so it was natural that once we found each other we wanted to keep being unlost with each other. But that, at heart, had made us exist.
David Levithan
#35. Muhammed's original view that earlier religions had been founded by God's will and through divine revelation, led both him and his successors to make an important concession: adherents of other religions were not compelled to adopt Islam.
C.H. Becker
#36. If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.
Edward Abbey
#37. I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.
Jeff Lindsay
#38. They had been Vince's brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn't drive a man's family to the earth and expect to live.
Joe Hill
#39. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plagueisdoneastoperiwigs, fornobody will daretobuy any haire for fear of the infectionthat it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.
Samuel Pepys
#40. My pride had been starched by a family who assumed unlimited authority in its own affairs.
Maya Angelou
#41. It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
C.S. Lewis
#42. She managed to finger-comb her hair into some kind of order, though it was a little too punk for her peace of mind. Not that she'd ever minded looking punk; in fact, the cut had been designed for that effect. But right now Reno was punk enough for both of them.
Anne Stuart
#43. Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.
Joseph Heller
#44. Meanwhile starvation and death were rampant. The Boar came in increasing numbers each passing week. Food that had been reserved to keep hungry children fed went instead to feed the endless bellies of the steadily growing barbarian hoard.
Seth A. Kathigen
#45. I was going to have to take each step forward in ignorance. But then, perhaps I always had. Perhaps any sense of control had been false, or based on a false understanding.
Meghan Ciana Doidge
#46. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain
#47. Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#48. Psst"he called.
The Cyclops lowered his hammer. He turned towards Zeus, but his one big eye had been staring into the flames so long that he couldn't see who was talking.
"I am not Psst"The Cyclops said " I am Brontes"
Oh boy, Zeus thought. This may take a while
Rick Riordan
#49. I was in the White House for a year and a half. Up to that point, all my jobs had been very unglamorous.
Desiree Rogers
#50. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,
Tom Holt
#51. I'd purchased it before my trip to the gay rodeo with a bunch of friends many moons ago. Many horses had been saved that weekend as many cowboys had been ridden. ...
Ethan Day
#52. I was never sure what vampire powers Teddy had been gifted with. Victoria had the ability to read minds. Meekah could see visions of the future. Michael had been given eternal sexiness, I guessed.
S.J. Wright
#53. All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.
Kiran Desai
#54. Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy's lips had been real cherries, probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.
Thomas Hardy
#55. I knew Bob Dylan was searching for the truth and had been for years. And anyone who Really wants the truth ends up at Jesus
Johnny Cash
#56. My parents walked around me on tiptoe, afraid of hurting me. But I knew how disappointed they were. All of a sudden the daughter they had been so proud of was a returnee from a mental hospital.
Haruki Murakami
#57. He never did rid himself of the feeling that he had been denied his rightful place. It kept him from being good-natured, and made him unwilling to forget grudges.
Warren Eyster
#58. I'm not mad, though," Kat said. "You lied to me, and I lied to you. We're even."
Finally he lost the grin. "When did you lie?"
She gave him a Sweet'N Low smile, as if his amusement had been poured into her. "Every time we messed around. I didn't actually enjoy myself, if you know what I mean.
Gena Showalter
#59. I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow, I was necessary.
Tosca Lee
#60. For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city of palaces, mosques, libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals were the most up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of rubble and a stench of decaying human flesh.
John Bagot Glubb
#61. I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors' families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining.
Tracy Chevalier
#62. As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.
Siri Hustvedt
#63. It had been a perfect nap
the sort a man runs into now and again by chance ...
Charles Finch
#64. That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.
Emma Cline
#65. The second theological perspective that influenced many of the Reformers was the belief that the Great Commission passages already had been fulfilled during the lifetime of the apostles.
Timothy Tennent
#66. Lila had been the water flowing over the jagged rocks of her anger & fear, smoothing them out with her infinite patience.
Vivi Andrews
#67. Where would I have ended up if I had been intelligent?
Joseph Beuys
#68. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.
Stephen King
#69. It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country-and especially the rights of trade unionists-if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.
Michael Foot
#70. Maureen had been born with the face of a gargoyle on the body of a sylph.
James Purdy
#72. Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.
Robert Galbraith
#73. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.
Hugh Howey
#74. At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. For which service the senate, with complimentary resolutions, enrolled me in its order ...
Augustus
#75. she had been moping around school, not wanting to do anything besides painting and reading books.
Kim Richardson
#76. I had been raised on country and western in Missouri. But gospel was great.
Steve Cropper
#77. Before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was the same sort of talk of young men sacrificing their lives so that a country might grow - that somehow it had been a great nation-building success for Newfoundland.
Michael Winter
#78. I can definitely say the same thing [discussing Steffi Graf's claim that she had played against at least one top player who used steroids]. Steroids can really make a difference, physically and mentally. I'd be really disappointed if I had been ranked No. 2 behind someone who took steroids.
Chris Evert
#79. He didn't know how to be someone's friend. That had been proven by the brilliant idea of murdering someone as a present. He definitely didn't know how to approach someone as a lover. That had been more than proven by what had happened at the hotel in France.
Santino Hassell
#80. Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
Gustave Flaubert
#81. The men who were running the church in the late '60s and '70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution.
Andrew Greeley
#82. Moroi shied from the sunlight but as I watched Sydney, I knew without a doubt that humans had been made for the sun.
Richelle Mead
#83. They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just he continual wrenching of experience.
Douglas Adams
#84. I think the millions of people who had been able to renegotiate their mortgages so they are paying lower interest rates are better off.
David Axelrod
#85. I jerked my phone out of my pocket and took a sharp left to follow the bold green line. I didn't fail to notice my walking icon had been replaced with a bicycle. Stupid Google. Doesn't have a "Succubus on Steroids" setting.
J.M. Friedman. Succubus in Seattle (Kindle Locations 1198-1199).
J.R. Thorn
#86. When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.
Robert Fisk
#87. On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.
Duke Ellington
#88. I had been living as if there were no tomorrow, and had nearly made that a reality.
Billy Idol
#89. Perhaps," observes James McPherson, "McClellan's career had been too successful. He had never known . . . the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility." Lincoln had clearly learned those lessons.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#90. I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.
H.G.Wells
#91. At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor - the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.
Stephen King
#92. Despite their common reputation as agents of God's will, forces of good, and the gold standard for morality, all the angels Dean had met over the last year had been shifty, manipulative dicks. Except Cas, of course.
Rebecca Dessertine
#93. I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.
Douglas Coupland
#94. [Livvy and her father] Neither of us had been as strong as we'd wanted to be.
Ann Howard Creel
#95. I believe that fact had been haunting Danny for all these years. But now he could change all that. He could right a wrong and rewrite history, for in his film not only he but also the entire cast of Taxi would be at Andy's funeral.
Bob Zmuda
#96. A penniless, jobless old college friend who had been offered several loans from banks to buy a house he couldn't afford. That's
Michael Lewis
#97. Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#98. The plain and simple fact was everyone sinned. Either they were good at hiding their sins, or they weren't. I fell in the latter category. My sins had been featured front and center, on display for everyone to judge.
Tiffany King
#99. walked on, thinking about the newspaper article I'd recently come across about three women in California - each one had been killed by a mountain lion on separate occasions over the past year - and
Cheryl Strayed
#100. Tiny emerged on deck some hours later, shaken but smiling. He said that what he had been considering love had turned out to be simple flatulence. He said he wished all his romantic problems could be solved as easily.
John Steinbeck
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