Top 100 It Might Have Been Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#3. That shot might not have been as good as it might have been.
John Motson
#4. My dear Mr. Schwartz, you appeared in the nick of time. It might have been a drama on the stage! I am very much in your debt.
Agatha Christie
#5. Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
B.F. Skinner
#6. An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass
Ron Rash
#7. It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#8. I even knew some of the dialogue but it was definitely cool to look at. We always argue that the movies should be loyal but in this case I could argue that it might have been too loyal.
Todd McFarlane
#9. 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
#10. I think it's easier to play when you do have a balanced home. I think if I did have alcoholism in my personal life, or my mother, or somebody close to me, it might have been much more uncomfortable to get in there.
Angelina Jolie
#11. I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails than two. I did it for convenience and I now looking back think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning.
Hillary Clinton
#12. 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
#13. I've said many times that in a way I think it might have been Bo who saved me. I was trying to save him, but I came out the other side a better person for knowing him.
Mercy Celeste
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I once said that it was unacceptable for Japan to remain "an isolated prosperous island." At one time, it might have been all right for Japan to avoid sending any citizens to dangerous areas [even as part of international efforts] and just wish for its own people's happiness. That time is gone.
Sadako Ogata
#17. Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
John Steinbeck
#18. Potter wasn't such an unusual name. He was sure there were lots of people called Potter who had a son called Harry. Come to think of it, he wasn't even sure his nephew was called Harry. He'd never even seen the boy. It might have been Harvey. Or Harold.
J.K. Rowling
#19. My heart hath often been deeply afflicted under a feeling that the standard of pure righteousness is not lifted up to the people by us, as a society, in that clearness which it might have been, had we been as faithful as we ought to be to the teachings of Christ.
John Woolman
#20. It might have been offset for us if the revenue from our own oil and natural gas that was just developing had been available to the Labor Government, but the oil revenues were just coming in when Labor fell in '79.
Barbara Castle
#21. That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them.
Colm Toibin
#22. This was another fossil of a joke. I couldn't remember where it'd come from, I had a horrible feeling it might have been me.
Alexis Hall
#23. Alan Rickman had to drop into a blue screen stretched over a bag. It might have been 30 feet, which is plenty scary. You'd break your back, especially if you were untrained, but this is the thing about it: What you see on his face when he lets go is real fear. It's one of the greatest shots ever.
Brian Abrams
#24. Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me.
Joe Biden, speaking at a town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, Sept. 10, 2008
Joe Biden
#25. I'm kind of happy to know there may be some kid or teenager now who might never have had the chance to see my Broadway performance, but gets a taste for what it might have been like now, because they can see Clint Eastwood's film.
John Lloyd Young
#26. And for a moment he simply held her and she held onto him.
It might have been the most perfect moment of his life so far.
Julie Anne Long
#27. Style consists in maintaining a convincing reality all through a piece. It's like wearing a garment that looks as if it might have been made for you even if it wasn't.
Arlene Croce
#28. I'd love to be in Paul McCartney's shoes for a day. I'd love to pick up a guitar and write songs like he does. Or to experience what it might have been like to be a Beatle for a day.
Tom Felton
#29. God bless the woman who'd invented air-conditioning. Okay, it might have been a man, but I'll bet you dollars to earthworms that a woman nagged him into it.
Carolyn Brown
#30. Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Apart from the faint odor of ink that pervaded the scene, it might have been real.
Jasper Fforde
#32. If it had been touch, it might have been pressure-not an uncomfortable pressure, but one that swept away all the pain of her headache. Like a river rushing through her mind, clearing out everything stagnant and clotted and decayed.
L.J.Smith
#33. To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods. If these truths mean the world is less comforting than it might have been, it seems like a pretty small price to pay.
Mira Grant
#34. Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent.
Terry Pratchett
#35. It might have been really cool back in the '50s when it was less populated but I don't know.
John Leguizamo
#36. There was something about Mikie that made me want to trust him. It might have been the Centanario Anejo.
Nadja Baer
#37. This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people - Scientology for scholarly seniors.
Robin Sloan
#38. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!
J.R.R. Tolkien
#39. 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
#40. A field of scarlet with nine hanged men in black and six yellow daggers in the upper left and lower right quadrants, respectively, while the upper right quandrant featured a shattered skull and the lower left boasted a bird astride a severed head. It might have been a raven. Or an eagle.
Glen Cook
#41. I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.
Anne Sexton
#42. Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
David Mitchell
#43. It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day.
Neal Stephenson
#44. One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
Peter Greenaway
#45. If you have a surprise idea, don't let it go! No matter if it's 4 AM, 6 AM or 12 AM, don't let it go! It might have been a great one!
B.A. Gabrielle
#46. An echo of his misery rang in me and confused itself with my own. That tear might have been for little Emy - it might have been for me - it probably was for me, but I'll tell myself it was for both of us, and perhaps one day I'll believe it.
Mark Lawrence
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.
Rod McKuen
#50. Such is life and life is such and after all it isn't much. First a cradle. Then a hearse. It might have been better, but it could have been worse.
Norman Wisdom
#51. This is the place to be. Baseball town. The intimacy of Fenway, the toughness of it. I like that. I'm used to it. I need it. If I went somewhere else, it might have been a bit of a letdown. I like the edge.
David Cone
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Somebody better be dead or dying."
He froze mid-step when he saw her. It might have been wishful thinking but she could've sworn his face lit up.
"Or just sitting there looking pretty," he finished with a heart-stopping grin.
Cherrie Lynn
#55. My heart beat fast, and I had a little trouble breathing. It felt like lust, but then again it might have been fear.
Marshall Thornton
#56. There are no bears on the island."
"Really, are you sure because I was hiking with my Dad and I'm sure I saw one? Either that or it was a humongous man-eating badger, with fangs. It might have been frothing at the mouth."
"Man-eating, huh? No problem then. I'm a girl.
Tracy Brogan
#57. If the Mongols had a motto, it might have been "Have weapon, will travel.
Steve Wiegand
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.
Maurice Ravel
#61. As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn't experienced ten years of living.
Liane Moriarty
#62. It might have been minutes or it might have been hours; time slept when swords woke.
George R R Martin
#63. Had it been published by a voice from heaven, that twelve poor men, taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross, it might have been thought an illusion against all reason of men; yet we know it was undertaken and accomplished by them.
Stephen Charnock
#64. Connie, have you been trying to call me?" No Archie. "Well, my phone has not been ringing all day, and I thought it might have been you.
Lawrence Sanders
#65. My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I received a telegram from the old people's home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Very sincerely yours." That doesn't mean anything. It might have been yesterday.
Albert Camus
#66. It might have been done before, but it hasn't been done by you!
Elizabeth Gilbert
#67. I was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. As you know, there are twelve banks and they have their citizens board, and I got elected to the Fed Chairmanship for the Federal Reserve Kansas City Bank back in the mid-'90s. It might have been 1995-'96.
Herman Cain
#68. There is more blood than paint upon these hands. All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had begun in the right way.
Winston Churchill
#69. 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
#70. The radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.
Bliss Perry
#71. 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
#72. The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
William Faulkner
#73. It might have been easier to retire, to say my knee couldn't handle it and let that be that. At the same time, the prospect of not being able to compete in gymnastics anymore was heartbreaking.
Shawn Johnson
#74. Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#75. In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been ... it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up ...
Julian Schnabel
#77. With live-action I think we'd have lost the universal appeal of the Persepolis story. With live-action, it would have turned into a story of 'the Other' - people living in a distant land who don't look like us. It might have been exotic, but also a "Third-World" story.
Marjane Satrapi
#78. 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
#79. The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.
Louis Menand
#80. So you think that the coco- mark well what I say, Hastings, the coco- contained strychnine?"
"Of course! That salt on the tray, what else could it have been?"
"It might have been salt." replied Poirot placidly.
Agatha Christie
#81. 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
#82. Introduction to Amanda. - The equal measure of fear and desire her double-barrelled bust induced was plain to see. It might have been a mundane observation but it was something of an epiphany to Amanda just what it meant to be the only person in the room wearing a bra.
Francine Scott
#83. Belief In Self
If you quit while pursuing your dreams, you will never know how close you've come to success. It might have been hidden behind that next door you decided not to open, since the last fifty doors revealed little or nothing.
Kamil Ali
#84. Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. I'm looking for people who are at the cutting edge of what they do, who think out-of-the-box. Even if their work is something common today, it might have been absolutely new when they started out, so we'd like to hear of their beginnings.
Lakshmi Pratury
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. It might have been the real reason I went out there at all, to hear all the nice things guys had to say when they got you alone, when they earned their shot in a booth with you.
Drew Nellins Smith
#89. He was obviously dead. But since he was a vampire that wasn't as hopeless a thing as it might have been.
Patricia Briggs
#90. 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
#91. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.
Teju Cole
#92. There is no expert on what happiness is but many on what it might have been.
Robert Breault
#93. I wished I'd thought of that last before I'd departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites.
Jay Lake
#94. It's just ... You know. You drive me crazy. You've always driven me crazy."
I think my mind is now all over the floor.
"And you don't think it might have been a good idea to maybe tell me this? I've spent the last ten years pining for you like an idiot, you idiot.
Charlotte Stein
#95. It might have been the hardest hit I took all day.
Drew Brees
#96. If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'
Bret Harte
#97. 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
#98. I think I grew up that night. It might have been Patrick that lost his virginity, but it was me that lost my innocence.
T.A. Webb
#99. Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.
Stephen Potter
#100. Yes," I said. "Before ... it's all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it's born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is." She
Diana Gabaldon
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