It Might Have Been Quotes

#1. If I hadn't been a singer, I might have been a photographer or an artist. But it's singing I love. I sing all the time, and I feel really good that I've expressed myself.

Annie Lennox

#2. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.

Lurlene McDaniel

#3. An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass

Ron Rash

#4. I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s.

Wim Wenders

#5. Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

William Faulkner

#6. I might have been made of metal once, but not anymore. Like Pinocchio, I'd turned into a real girl. So far it sucked. But there was nothing I could do about it.

Natalie Standiford

#7. It is never too late to be who you might have been. It is always possible

Steve Miller

#8. Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them.
Bill James

Michael Lewis

#9. There are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told 'College Me' that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would've been like, "That is not a word, and it never should be."

John Green

#10. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.

John Stuart Mill

#11. For when it pleased the Lord in Aug. 1829, to bring me really to the Scriptures, my life and walk became very different. And though even since that I have very much fallen short of what I might and ought to be, yet, by the grace of God, I have been enabled to live much nearer to Him than before. "If

George Muller

#12. It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.

Alice McDermott

#13. It's me, it's been me all along and I might have saved your life, but I would be nothing if it wasn't for you. I would be just another mech-droid and I wouldn't know what's like to love someone so much I would give up everything for them.

Marissa Meyer

#14. It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

Jerry Garcia

#15. She saw Valentine's eyes as the sword hurtled toward her; it seemed
like eons, though it could only have been a split second. She saw that he
could stop the blow if he wanted. Saw that he knew it might well strike her
if he didn't. Saw that he was going to do it anyway.

Cassandra Clare

#16. I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing.

Charles Dickens

#17. Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#18. I might have been a psychologist. It interests me.

Richie Sambora

#19. I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

#20. When women get together, they tell stories. This is how it has always been. Telling stories is our way of saying who we are, where we have come from, what we know, and where we might be headed.

Jalaja Bonheim

#21. It wasn't until I'd turned 50 and had been in the business 25 years that I realized I might actually have a career as an actor.

James Garner

#22. It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

Anne Roiphe

#23. If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.

Sebastian Barry

#24. A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here.

Neal Stephenson

#25. She could not tell him that she protested because she did not believe he loved her enough to become his wife. It was no ordinary man but the Prince of Light who was asking her to be his bride. And, she thought gloomily, what sacrifice might she have disregarded had his gaze been only for her?

Noriko Ogiwara

#26. Might have been enough for a warning - it looked so like a human being dried up and distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and things instead of thoughts.

George MacDonald

#27. What I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it
might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.

Douglas Coupland

#28. I do feel as if I'm living a blessed life at the moment. I've been thinking about the phrase 'living a dream,' because that's exactly what is happening. I'm just trying to go with the flow and take each day as it comes, otherwise I might freak out at all the things that have happened recently.

Katherine Jenkins

#29. There have been times of late when I have had to hold on to one text with all my might: "It is required in stewards that a man may be found faithful." Praise God, it does not say "sucessful.

Amy Carmichael

#30. Things might have been a lot worse. Don't you worry about it overmuch. When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time. Worrying never made a sailor.

Arthur Ransome

#31. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people - Scientology for scholarly seniors.

Robin Sloan

#32. It may have lost its special-ness forever and the clubs might not being doing well but I think standup is in the best shape it has been in a long time.

Marc Maron

#33. I've died so many times. I'm 65. On my 40th birthday, my girlfriend gave me a reel with ways I had died, whether it was by knife, or electrocution or drowning or being thrown off a building or whatever it might have been. I've died a lot of times!

Jonathan Banks

#34. It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#35. Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?

Joyce G. Baldwin

#36. Maybe you could take us to meet them," says Delon. She raises her eyebrows. "When I called you a fool earlier, I meant it figuratively. Now you're making me think I might have a been a bit too generous." "But you know how to contact them." "Why would I do that?" Delon

Richard Kadrey

#37. Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.

Sarah Vowell

#38. There are many activities that human beings have been doing "forever." We might argue from that perspective that eating meat should be allowed to continue. Men have been raping women for thousands of years; does that mean that it is normal and should be allowed to continue?

Sharon Gannon

#39. I agree with ... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#40. You might not have thought it possible to give birth to others before one has given birth to oneself, but I assure you it is quite possible, it has been done; I offer myself in evidence as Exhibit A.

Sheila Ballantyne

#41. And at last father flung the rug off as if it were hampering him and strode over to the table saying, 'cocoa, cocoa!'
it might have been the most magnificent drink in the world; which, personally, I think it is.

Dodie Smith

#42. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

David Berlinski

#43. I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.

J.P. Delaney

#44. It'd just been a relief to think that for a moment he might have been as lonely as me.

Sarah J. Maas

#45. Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped.

Geraldine Brooks

#46. I guess when Rick is finished with his Journey to the Centre of the Earth, then we might have a go at something. We'd like to, we're open to it, and we've been talking about it.

Keith Emerson

#47. It might have been the seventies, but if you're old enough for a moustache you're too old for strawberry-patterned trousers.

Jo Wood

#48. It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead.

Georgette Heyer

#49. Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Fernando Pessoa

#50. Hey," Dopey said when I was finished reading. "How come they never mentioned me? I'm the one who found the skeleton."
"Oh, yeah," Sleepy said in disgust. "Your role was really crucial. After all, if it wasn't for you, the guy's
skull might still have been intact.

Meg Cabot

#51. When he closed his eyes, he felt how it might have happened: slowly, Laurent's mouth opening, Laurent's hands lifting hesitantly to touch his body. He would have been careful, so careful. Aimeric

C.S. Pacat

#52. If the Mongols had a motto, it might have been "Have weapon, will travel.

Steve Wiegand

#53. If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work.

W.S. Merwin

#54. Enjoy them while you may," answered Rashaverak gently. "They will not be yours for long." It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and a terror it had never held before.

Arthur C. Clarke

#55. They would assume she was a boy, because in her plain trousers and hood she looked like one, and because when people were attacked it never occurred to anyone that it might have been a girl.

Kristin Cashore

#56. It's never too late to be the person you might have been. ~George Eliot

A.J. Warner

#57. And the marriage thing? You'll give it a shot?
She grinned into the sunlight. It might not have been the world's most romantic proposal, but it suited her. It suited her just fine.

Nora Roberts

#58. It'll probably be brutal, too. They might even feed you to the dog.
He doesn't have a dog.
Yeah, well, he might get one just to feed you to it.
She'd never been the kind of person to let something as ridiculous as rational logic interfere with her fear.' (Alix)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#59. It was an emotional roller coaster - going from Christmas, then your aunt dies, and then all the stats come out and you might get all these records. I've been asked, 'How do you feel' Tired. I'm really blessed we do have this week off where I can kind of grab a hold back to reality.

Shaun Alexander

#60. If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb.

Emilio G. Segre

#61. It might have been introduced slowly over the course of the years as you recall this memory over and over. So that was a very cool but complex idea that we thought about representing in the film but could not find a way to make it work.

Pete Docter

#62. Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.

Olivia Sudjic

#63. It has been remarked that almost every character which has excited either attention or pity has owed part of its success to merit, and part to a happy concurrence of circumstances in its favor. Had Caesar or Cromwell exchanged countries, the one might have been a sergeant and the other an exciseman.

Oliver Goldsmith

#64. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people's experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one's life been different.

Virginia Woolf

#65. If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

Pablo Picasso

#66. If it had been a color, it might have been green. If it had touched her ears, it might have sounded rhythmic, like the creak of a rocking chair or drone of a bee. If it had a scent, it might have been sweet and drowsy, like fresh pine on the fire.

Shannon Hale

#67. Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.

Dave Eggers

#68. How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners.

Gerald Heaney

#69. You come to me three, four months ago, knowing it, and I might have said you're right. God meant me to not love anyone. Be a rock. Don't be touched by no one. But now I've been touched, in here." I tapped my chest. "There is no fear in love, but love casteth out fear.

James Buchanan

#70. Honestly speaking, I don't like my films. When I watch them, I see a lot of scope for improvement, so if I were to see any of my films, like 'Dhoom,' I might say ... 'It would have been better if ... ' or 'had it been ... ' and this is all about evolving.

Abhishek Bachchan

#71. She was wearing a bright purple dress that was so short, I thought it might have started its life as a shirt. She would've been pretty if her face hadn't looked like she'd just taken a big swig of sour milk.

Rachel Hawkins

#72. Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don't think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you're a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.

Colin Firth

#73. Food critic and writer Waverley Root described the common American near beer as "such a wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever."[21]

Waverly Root

#74. It's just the way things are. And you can't dwell on what might have been. You have to look at what is.

Sophie Kinsella

#75. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me. The

Sylvia Plath

#76. Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been.

Kurt Vonnegut

#77. It might not have been Mike,' she said, 'but somebody left something somewhere.'

I couldn't really argue with that. It was as succinct a summing up of the seeming randomness of events in life as I had ever heard.

Bob Tarte

#78. She was grieving the loss of her youth, the closing down of possibilities as life became what it was rather than what it might have been.

Kimberley Freeman

#79. Look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not tell a lie
could not tell a lie! But he never had any chance. It might have been different if he had belonged to the Washington Newspaper Correspondents' Club

Mark Twain

#80. If I wanted to make a quick buck, there's far easier ways of doing it. What I want is to provoke people. If you want a hit song, all you need to do is rewrite an old song. It might have been proven to work, but you won't be remembered the same way.

Avicii

#81. When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

Ron Eglash

#82. It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.

Joyce Carol Oates

#83. The internet might be a convenience, but it hasn't yet, for me, been a fundamental reordering. These things are supposed to be time-savers, so you have more time standing at your easel if you so choose.

Joe Bradley

#84. Now that I think about it, this might all have been inevitable. The reason we all ended up here, the reason I couldn't leave her alone...it all had to be a ridiculous fairy tale.

Jun Mochizuki

#85. Something bloomed right then and there in the small dark space between us. I didn't know what it was, but I knew enough to know it was rare and delicate. And it felt so real I might have been able to reach out and touch it if I tried.

Alyxandra Harvey

#86. I might have been eleven years old and a little socially immature, but I recognized a gauntlet being thrown down when I saw it, and I had no choice but to take it up.

Gayle Forman

#87. Labeling a child's mind as diseased-whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism-may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

Andrew Solomon

#88. ...as I have been thinking about this, I decided it might be better to be a broken man than a man who never risked breaking anything.

Douglas Wilson

#89. I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.

Mary Karr

#90. As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

Jade Chang

#91. It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

H.P. Lovecraft

#92. The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.

William Dean Howells

#93. She had never been taught to ask permission to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs. Medlock if she might walk about the house, even if she had seen her.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#94. The things that have always been important: to be a good man, to try to live my life the way God would have me, to turn it over to Him that His will might be worked in my life, to do my work without looking back, to give it all I've got, and to take pride in my work as an honest performer.

Johnny Cash

#95. Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Haruki Murakami

#96. He just wanted to see it. From afar. To see what might have been, what he was glad hadn't been. But maybe should have been.

Julia Quinn

#97. It is the large aggregate of small things perpetually occurring that robs me of all my time. The expense of learning to read might have been spared in my education, for I never read.

Hannah More

#98. She might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

Colum McCann

#99. You should get him a mixed tape,' said Elyaas. 'Kids love mixed tapes. They're the cool 'in' thing right now.'
'was the last time you were summoned the eighties?' Magnus asked.
'It might have been,' Elyaas said defensively

Cassandra Clare

#100. But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.

Thomas Hardy