Top 100 Quotes About Could Have Been
#1. 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
#2. The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.
Simon Conway Morris
#3. 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
#4. I'm not going to hold my breath because life goes on. Life is too short to sit around moaning about what could have been or what was.
Tina Weymouth
#5. For too long nurses have been undervalued, restricted in what they could do, with too few career opportunities in clinical practice. For far too long, nurses have endured a pay system that has held them back - both professionally as well as financially.
John Hutton
#6. They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That's my motto.
Joe R. Lansdale
#7. 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
#8. My life is great. It's just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been." "You killed your ambition, didn't you?" "It died of natural causes. Of neglect.
Blake Crouch
#9. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
Rachel Hartman
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
Dean Wesley Smith
#13. If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.
Albert Ellis
#14. 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
#15. But define 'completely ridiculous shit,'" Duvall said. "Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don't understand that crap at all. As far as I'm concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.
John Scalzi
#16. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.
Patricia Cornwell
#17. All my life I have been honest-comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly-I could only lend it.
Mark Twain
#18. Hacking was the only entertainment that would occupy my mind - like a huge video game, but with real consequences. I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.
Kevin Mitnick
#19. There is something universal in the theme of a man trying to save his family in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. It is not limited to Sierra Leone. This story could apply to any number of places where ordinary people have been caught up in political events beyond their control.
Edward Zwick
#20. You can learn a lot about a person by where they are from and where they have chosen to be."
"You'll never know what could have been if it never was.
Sarah Sloat
#21. It was five, but it could have been six, seven or eight goals, in my opinion.
Robin Van Persie
#22. I should have been a much better artist if I could have studied more and amused myself less.
Ida Rentoul Outhwaite
#23. My stiffest earthly assignment is ended and my major life's work is done. My country is now free and I have been honoured to be its first indigenous head of state. What more could one desire in life?
Nnamdi Azikiwe
#24. 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
#25. Me, when it comes to religion, I have no God. When I'm cool, I don't need anyone, and when I'm feeling shitty and this big empty hole opens up inside me, I just know there's never been a god that could fill it and there never will be.
Etgar Keret
#26. I consider every one of the Disney films that Bob & I worked on, to have been the luckiest break any two songwriters could have ever had. They all aimed at quality and timelessness. That's why they live over the years.
Richard Sherman
#27. I'm not good, Mac. Never have been.'
What-true confession time? my eyes tease. Don't need it.
'I want what I want and I take it.'
Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?
'There's nothing I can't live with. Only things I won't live without.
Karen Marie Moning
#28. Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort.
Jane Austen
#29. About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?
Kurt Vonnegut
#30. He could no longer pretend not to have been brought to his knees by her blows, and he could no longer avoid the sentiments that his heart forced him to feel.
Llarjme
#31. It seems quite bizarre how much I loved one big bundle of all of my demons, but that may have been his core appeal. If he could embrace me, there was a chance I could become tolerable, even passable in those worlds that considered me a plague.
Maggie Young
#32. The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.
James Anthony Froude
#33. After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.
William B. Irvine
#34. I have been asked what would I ban immediately if I could. Advertising.
Vivienne Westwood
#35. I can't compare the lives I could have lived. One would have been comfort and security. But the other ... " She sighs. "It was the most love and the most pain and the most wonder I could have ever known.
Carrie Ryan
#36. I was always watching you. This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell.
Yoko Ogawa
#37. I'm always happy to have the President visit North Carolina. Unfortunately, the citizens of North Carolina who could be most adversely affected by the President's plan have not been invited to the discussion.
Mel Watt
#38. There were times when I wondered if I was doing the right thing, studying when I could have been going to auditions.
Eve Hewson
#39. He [Piers] might have been a goofy flake, but he was, in the end, her goofy flake, and she loved him as much as she could.
Craig Robertson
#40. The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.
Michelle Franklin
#41. If Jesus simply came to tell us what to do and provide moral instruction so we could try harder to please God, then his life would have been an utter failure.
Matt Perman
#42. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable
Robert James Waller
#43. If it had been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#44. Has anything bad ever happened in YOUR life? Anything bad that could have been stopped, if only someone had been paying better attention?"..."And you, Kanan? Is there something bad that could have been prevented, if someone had been watching over you?"..."EVERYBODY'S got something like that.
John Jackson Miller
#45. All of the years I spent trying to be someone you could be proud of would have been better spent being proud of myself for who I already was.
Paula Heller Garland
#47. Actually, he told me later that I had turned him gay . . . by taking codeine again. And I said, "You know, I never read that warning on the label." I thought it said heavy machinery, not homosexuality - turns out I could have been driving those tractors all along! Turning
Carrie Fisher
#48. It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#49. Two persons have been elected to the offices of President and Vice-President exclusively by the people of ONE SECTION of the country ... A clearer case of foreign domination could not well be presented.
John Willis Ellis
#50. Had it been like that for her father? She could never know. But for the first time in a very long while, she had some sense of who Anakin Skywalker might have been before his fall, and of the goodness that must have survived in him through all the darkness, all the years.
Claudia Gray
#51. 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
#52. There are many experts on how things have been done up to now. If you think something could use a little improvement, you are the expert.
Robert Breault
#53. I feel there are so many things in this world that have been and are being created that I could spend the rest of my life thinking about, and I couldn't cover all the things I'm interested in. That to me is what makes life sweet-learning and exploring.
James Franco
#54. I think President Obama could have handled politics and policies differently. But he has been decisive, strong, and consistent - important qualities in a president. Mitt Romney is indeed an Etch A Sketch, the antithesis of leadership.
Eliot Spitzer
#55. You really can't worry about stuff you can't control ... You need to focus on getting where you need to be and not worry about what could have been and what should have been.
Robbie Lawler
#56. Certainly, men have been availing themselves of the services of prostitutes from the moment those early hominids stood upright and certain women could say, "Hey there, sailor"; it's not called the world's oldest profession for nothing.
Elissa Stein
#57. The savagery of the picture strange and alluring, Frank smeared with blood and absolutely at ease. Barbarian, primitive, visceral; if Tony had been given to myth-making, he would have wondered if there could be any more frightening god than one who was simultaneously provider and destroyer.
Aleksandr Voinov
#58. People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.
Bayard Taylor
#59. The Stones were always exemplary of one of the best of all rock qualities: tightness. They have always been economical, the opposite of ornamental. Having a very clear idea of what they wanted to say they could go into a studio and make it all up on a three minute cut.
Jon Landau
#60. I can't even think about what life "could
have been" like in Boston, without crying. It's like deja-vu, I don't think me
and Boston were ever meant to be.
Cecelia Ahern
#61. Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
Alice Neel
#62. Now I knew why I had been hollowed out, why my insides were chipped away with a chisel and mallet. It was to make room for this new feeling, this love that was so vast, so expansive it could not have fit into the vessel I once was.
Lang Leav
#63. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. ... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.
Jennifer Niven
#64. You could talk about same-sex marriage, but people who have been married (say) 'It's the same sex all the time.'
Robin Williams
#65. 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
#66. So I watched the Pink Panther last night, and so I'm trying desperately to be funny, and then it's just not working out so good ... I wonder if maybe I could've been a comedian or something like that, or maybe I could've been a doctor, then I wouldn't have to make anyone laugh.
Dave Matthews
#67. And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know
Aldous Huxley
#68. My career could have been prolonged for longer
Micky Quinn
#69. It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.
K'naan
#70. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
George Orwell
#71. Grand," he said. "I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting to call you until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Affliction." (He really said "in re". That boy.)
John Green
#72. I've always been a massive fan of Batman. He didn't have any powers, so it meant that anyone could be Batman.
Erin Richards
#73. Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)
Andre Dubus III
#74. You were upset. I hurt you. Something must have happened to make you stay away from me. Is that right?" His nose was pressed under my ear and I fought back another round of tears because he just didn't fully grasp it. He could have been repeating Sheila's words for all I knew.
"You're leaving.
Amber L. Johnson
#75. 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
#76. Further, by acting decisively in Iraq, the United States has sent very strong signals to other nations that have been or could be terrorist sympathizers.
Jim Gerlach
#77. I have a collection of vintage sundresses, and I've never worn them because for some reason I always opt for shorts and a t-shirt. I wish I could commit to them. I will. I have a few really great pieces I've been holding onto for years.
Tatiana Maslany
#78. Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.
George Dennison Prentice
#79. Men have been intimidated by my relationship with Howard. You know, it's hard for them to imagine that they could be number one, seeing this relationship.
Robin Quivers
#80. It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It's what depression does to a person, it changes them completely.
Melina Marchetta
#81. There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.
J.M. Barrie
#82. I suppose if I wanted to be the girl next door, I could have been. I think America is confused by someone who appears to be sexual and spiritual at the same time.
Sally Kirkland
#83. We took off our clothes, and we were basically in a sphere of love and light and warmth, and the rest of the world disappeared. It was better than I ever could have dreamed, it was that thing I had been looking for, that love mixed with the rapture of sex.
Anthony Kiedis
#84. Decades of Saddam's rule made what could have been a fairly rich country, due to its oil reserves, into a very poor one.
Chris Kyle
#85. I could have killed her when we first met and I've been out of jail by now.
Waylon Jennings
#86. Emotions are lovely. Even if they fall to the negative for a time. The sun will rise again another day. The sadness perhaps never forgotten, but a new day enjoyed in another way. A way that could not have been but for the sadness's existence.
Anne Mallory
#87. 'Tom Sawyer' could have been written eight months ago, with the kind of response it still gets.
Alex Lifeson
#88. It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other
Alice McDermott
#89. All my life Ive known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?
John F. Kennedy
#90. I have been thinking about what might happen if they installed clappers to turn on and off the lights in a concert hall. Maybe they could spare the cost of hiring some people for the next rock concert.
Linnea Gelland
#91. The whole thing could have been uncomfortable if all your wishes were to be drowned in to the sea or passed through a heart of a lion that shed not the innocent blood.
Auliq Ice
#92. No-one will ever have golf under his thumb. No round ever will be so good it could not have been better. Perhaps this is why golf is the greatest of games. You are not playing a human adversary; you a playing a game. You are playing old man par.
Bobby Jones
#93. We can no longer tolerate losing one more innocent child or putting one more firefighter at risk in a fire that could have been prevented at the cost of pennies by making a couple simple changes to the construction of a cigarette.
Ed Markey
#94. There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#95. I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.
Whitley Strieber
#96. Although he could have been wearing a seventies lounge suit and she probably would have drooled over the polyester.
J.R. Ward
#97. I'm a little frightened, perhaps. We always are, aren't we? When we have to open a door that's always been there...but we've never opened. [...] I mean frightened by the immensity of what lies beyond the door. A God of Love--infinite and eternal. How could I ever be worthy of that?
Tony Hendra
#98. How could I have been a wife, a mother and a singer? Who takes care of the piccolini when you go around the world? Your children would not call you 'Mama,' but 'Renata.'
Renata Tebaldi
#99. Pity is an emotion that should have never been created. Pity was strong and could break the backs of people fighting for survival and respect. I couldn't stand pity.
Elizabeth Isaacs
#100. 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
