Top 100 Quotes About Could Have Been
#1. Pining for what could have been only holds people back from living their lives now. Life is full of surprises, and it doesn't help us to fixate on regrets or try to recover what has been lost.
Jeff Goins
#2. When a couple gets to the last stage, one or both partners may have an affair. But an affair is usually a symptom of a dying marriage, not the cause. The end of that marriage could have been predicted long before either spouse strayed.
John M. Gottman
#3. In practical terms the South Pointing Chariot was a simple direction finder. It could have been made to point in any direction - north, south, east or west.
Kit Williams
#4. When happiness makes a guest appearance in one's life,it's important to make the most of it.It may not stay around for long and when it has gone wouldn't it be terrible to think that all the time one could have been happy was wasted worrying when the happiness would be taken away.
Marian Keyes
#5. Honestly, the only way Garden State could have been better was if I played every character. I'm awesome.
Zach Braff
#6. I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.
Harry Shearer
#7. It's part of us," she said jerkily. "How could I not want part of us? It's your baby.I'm carrying your baby and I love it so much already it terrifies me."
"Oh,Diana." He touched her then, gently, his hands on her face. "You've let two weeks go by when we could have been terrified together.
Nora Roberts
#8. He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate
Salman Rushdie
#9. I realized that I could have been in galleries much sooner. I just needed to get past the fear of rejection. I still feel nervous when I approach a new gallery, although it has become more like a job now. The first step on this long road was getting past that initial fear.
Mark Edward
#10. On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.
Lyn Macdonald
#11. It's such a relief to know these are universal truths for so many of us in the adoption triad. Gosh, how much easier things could have been for you, for me, and your folks, if literature like this had been around, say, five, ten years ago, when we could've all really used it.
Paula Gruben
#12. Love, and trust. The things that make us human. They could have been mine, if only I could have leapt. If only we could have leapt.
Amie Kaufman
#13. They could have been nice to me instead of treating me like an idiot.
Norma McCorvey
#14. There's always male roles I want to play. I'm so annoyed when I watch movies and go, "That could have been played by a woman."
Jennifer Lawrence
#15. Even when life turns out different than what you've planned, it's always better to try and fail than to wonder what could have been.
Kirsten Hubbard
#16. Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#17. Country music has changed tremendously, so what now is considered country was not considered country at that time. We were doing stuff that probably could have been called country music today, but would certainly have not have fit in at that time.
Charlie Daniels
#18. Why am I exactly this and not that being? at this point of unlimited space and in this moment of infinite time? in this group of beings, on this planet? Why do I exist if I could have been without existence?
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
#19. A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!
Margaret Atwood
#20. Life could have been different if the meetings which have decided its course had been less silent, superficial or routine, if more thoughts had been exchanged, if humanity had been more able to show itself in them
Theodore Zeldin
#21. My life could have been so grim ... really, really grim.
Graham Norton
#22. My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.
Armistead Maupin
#23. I understood now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he is.
Justina Chen
#24. Collin! What a gorgeous name. Then again his name could have been Cracker Jack and I would have thought it was just as wonderful.
Nicole Gulla
#25. It could have been worse. I could have been born black.
Stevie Wonder
#26. The way we looked at each other was more intimate than a kiss could have been
Leah Raeder
#27. Don't give up love for what might be, for if you do, you shall never know what could have been.
Darby Browne
#28. Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#29. Taking chances is always a good thing. If we don't take chances we loose our adventurous side, and all the things that could have been if we didn't take them.
Sandra Golden
#30. The one time Egwene had protested that Elyas was the one who wanted to go around hills and he should not blame them, it got her a lecture on how sound carried, delivered in a growl that could have been heard a mile off.
Robert Jordan
#31. Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
Anne Carson
#32. I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.
Jeanette Winterson
#33. It could have been a second, an hour, a year, a hundred millennia; all were correct. The first thing I saw when my wits returned was the utter shock in Sethian's eyes. It had been my thought that the experience was the elf's doing. His expression was telling me I couldn't have been more wrong.
Cristina Rayne
#34. He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.
Jose Marti
#35. The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren't there anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You're still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.
Laura Dave
#36. The benches were magnificent. They could have been a hundred years old. They were made from solid mahogany,
Lee Child
#37. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.
Christopher Moore
#38. Everything I've done today could have been done by a bear. The long seasoned sleep. The lumbering out of bed. Tearing at a hard roll dipped in honey. And then sprawling lazily in the grass when the sun hit.
Bill Callahan
#39. There was a time I could have been mistaken for Burt Reynolds. I had a moustache and so did he. But he was the number one star in the world, so there wasn't really much confusion.
Tom Selleck
#40. I think that I could have been take apart if the bear market continued, but I waited three years before I felt the bear market was over and I was right.
Jim Cramer
#41. Carles Puyol is a Barcelona legend. He could have been playing every two weeks but he has shown dignity until the end.
Cesc Fabregas
#42. If he had to have strange powers, Aden wished they could have been more like hers. That voodoo voice would have made his life a lot easier; he could have sent certain people (cough Ozzie cough) away with no memory of him.
Gena Showalter
#43. It could have been like a fairy tale. But fairy tales aren't real. Things don't work like that. There's a price for everything.
Maureen Johnson
#44. No one could have been more surprised than I at my successes, and yet deep within me there was acknowledgment that had I not succeeded, I would have been equally surprised.
Margery Wilson
#45. It shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy.
Hope Mirrlees
#46. Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.
H.G.Wells
#47. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.
Robert A. Heinlein
#48. He won't feel a fraction of what I do for you. You won't change his life. And you will always wonder about what could have been, always feel that funny little ache right here. He puts his hand over your heart.
Josh Lanyon
#49. You could have been the King that our side deserved.
Anonymous
#50. My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
James Welch
#51. So you'll excuse me if I have to disagree with you. It is not okay-it will not ever be okay-and whereas I'm more than willing to live with the fact that I was a walking, talking lie for decades, the idea that it sacrificed what could have been between us ... is absolutely, positively not okay to me.
J.R. Ward
#52. Much insight into himself could have been gained from contemplation of these things, but Wintrow reined his mind away from it. Perhaps he did not want to know himself quite that well."
p. 543
Robin Hobb
#53. I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. How different our life could have been and how different we could have been as a person if one little decision was altered.
M.B. Julien
#56. For my part, I sincerely esteem the Constitution, a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.
Alexander Hamilton
#57. She was so pitiful as she lay there on the cold, damp ground that only a heart of stone could have been unmoved. There are many hearts of that composition, however.
Elizabeth Peters
#58. I think I could have been quite difficult to fathom as a youngster, this kid who didn't talk about himself very much.
Bob Brown
#59. I liked the banana-seat bikes with the high handlebars - maybe a card in the wheel could have been part of it.
Stone Gossard
#60. It could have been possible to put a little more fuck you into his tone, but some of it might've slopped out the sides.
Lilith Saintcrow
#61. Creating is the means to breathe life into something that never was, could have been, or someday might be.
L.M. Fields
#62. This house could have been a prison or a hospital, but a prison where they locked up the innocent to prevent them from suffering, or a hospital where one goes to recover from the labor of life. And Monelle was both the jailer and the nurse.
Marcel Schwob
#63. She could have been an interior decorator, a good one, too, if it wasn't for the pressing demands of so on and so forth.
Ellen Raskin
#64. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a burst of light so warm and red it could have been the sun or someone's beating heart. I stared up at it, waiting for the room to come clear.
Brenna Yovanoff
#65. If I had an extra 20 or 50 years physically, I could have been the dancer of my dreams. But I never became that dancer.
Erik Bruhn
#66. AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.
Larry Kramer
#67. If I had known, would I have gone back sooner? If there was an audible reshuffle and click every time my path was altered, some Jumanji-like close-up of a game piece slotting into place, would it have changed our fate? It could have been that moment or a million before it; I'll never know.
Vikki Wakefield
#68. If I could have been anyone in the world, it would have been Ronaldinho. He's fantastic, I love watching him.
Frank Lampard
#69. And he raised his glass to her. It could have been a compliment. Or the most sarcastic gesture anyone had ever made to her.
Lisa Kleypas
#70. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Jefferson
#71. I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse borne away with every breath! Misplaced upon the throne misplaced in life. I know not what I could have been, but feel I am not what I should be let it end.
Lord Byron
#72. Every few years, I go back into all the songs and I update them so that it never sounds like an oldies show. If you come to the shows, they're full of muscle. 'Copacabana' sounds like it could have been released yesterday.
Barry Manilow
#73. A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.
So much worse, Mom said.
But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't.
You did so good, Mom said.
Did beautiful, Dad said.
George Saunders
#74. Every minute you spend looking through clutter, wondering where you put this or that, being unable to focus because you're not organized costs you: time you could have spent with family or friends, time you could have been productive around the house, time you could have been making money.
Jean Chatzky
#75. My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.
Natalie Goldberg
#76. The two things that could have been better is number one, to get major military force into the community almost immediately to make sure that there was law and order. Number two, we had enough helicopters to airlift food into the centers of population and those places.
Warren Rudman
#77. We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.
Ally Condie
#78. At the beginning of my TV and movie stuff, I would be really critical of myself, but I've gotten better and better. There's always little things that I think, "Oh, that could have been whatever," but most of the time I'm able to let go and watch like an audience member.
Mireille Enos
#79. I could have been more famous if I did all the glitzy things, but celebrity always seemed so unnecessary.
Enya
#80. Being British, we tend to think of ourselves as America's best friend. And as your best friend, that gives us a little bit of license to point out things that could have been handled better.
Philip Kerr
#81. We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.
Michael Burgess
#82. No one could have been nicer, classier nor better looking than Dick Clark. I've had a crush on him since I was a teenager.
Dolly Parton
#83. Unlike what happened after Pearl Harbor, however, the Bush administration would not order a "review of how they could have been so badly surprised" because the results would have shown "a colossal bureaucratic failure, combined with inattention and a lack of political will at the top.
Andrew P. Napolitano
#84. I could have played more complex stuff. I could have been a busier player. But that's not what I wanted to do. I played what I wanted to play.
Don Henley
#85. Imagine if we all walked around looking at strangers and thinking, You could have been my son or daughter. Imagine.
Karin Evans
#86. How it could have been different, how different decisions and events could have taken place. I'm not sure how it would have played out differently. I just didn't want it to play out the way it did.
Eric Mangini
#87. These people living on the streets could have been friends you once knew. They are people who have somehow fallen through the gaps and found themselves, often through unimaginable circumstances, on the cusp of existence. In another reality, this could easily be me or you.
Kathryn Prescott
#88. My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.
Kary Mullis
#89. Ivy could have been a model. Hell, Ivy could be anything she wanted. Except happy. Ivy had issues.
Kim Harrison
#90. Tired faith all worn and thin, for all we could have done, and all that could have been.
Trent Reznor
#91. I have a profound admiration for Fellini. I met him lately and he's just fantastic. I feel very close to him even though he's very Italian. But his films could have been made in every country. When I say, I feel close to him, then also because we're both born on January 20th.
David Lynch
#92. Drugs is a society problem. It ain't just isolated to sports or entertainment. There's people that are doing brain surgeries that probably have dabbled in drugs. There may be some, judges and lawyers involved in the case could have been involved. So it's a problem in all society.
Dave Parker
#93. When I first met you," Stellan said again, sleepily, "I thought you were an idiot. Who gets on a plane with a stranger who just pulled a knife on her?" he said. "What is wrong with you? I could have been a serial killer.
Maggie Hall
#94. Too bad you're like my older sister. We could have been something special."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Older? You're seventy-six!"
"Boo, you whore," he said.
T.J. Klune
#95. I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
Hannah Senesh
#96. While I've never 'phoned in' a performance, I think I have given some performances where I could have been a bit braver.
James Nesbitt
#97. I was afraid of last place, ... There were a lot of fears. Below .500 - I never thought I'd see that here. Then, losing 100 games seemed like a possibility, then 90 games. All of those things could have been a reality here. The grave seemed like a reality here, but the guys didn't let it happen.
Felipe Alou
#98. I wasn't very good in academics, but I could have been if I could have studied well. I was a smart kid.
Virat Kohli
#99. We can only be ourselves in the long run. Everyone can be someone else for a time. Actors have jobs for a reason. But eventually, our true natures win out. You never could have been someone else for long, even if you tried. It would have broken you
Jeanette Murray
#100. Marx's theory that only capitalists benefit from capitalism and workers are exploited was completely wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Workers earned more as economies grew.
Kenneth Rogoff
