Top 82 Quotes About How Life Could Have Been
#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#2. As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.
Candice Millard
#3. The day had been a slowly closing door. The rest of the world moved on out into the stream of life, while I was left stranded and forgotten on the riverbank, at low tide.
Lia Mills
#4. I am a sore loser. I've always been like that ever s'nce I started playin' sports and just life in general. I hate to lose and I play to win.
Snoop Dogg
#5. [A]ll her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.
Georges Bernanos
#6. My greatest gift in life was being dyslexic. It made me special. It made me different. If I had not been dyslexic, I wouldn't have needed sports.
Caitlyn Jenner
#7. Don't ever try to judge me dude. You don't know what the fuck I've been through
Eminem
#8. The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.
David Baldacci
#9. True independence is an illusion; no one matures in a vacuum. We have heroes, we see villains, and ultimately we try to walk the path that's our own, through an ideological valley whose landmarks have already been described and claimed by others.
Nicolas Wilson
#10. I come from a long line of architects. I'm the only one who did not become an architect, but I've been around the drawing aspect and construction my whole life.
Kym Whitley
#11. What has been seen cannot be unseen, what has been learned cannot be unknown. You cannot change the past, but you can learn from it. You can grow from it. You can be made stronger. You can use that strength to change your life, to change your future.
C.A. Woolf
#12. How slowly life moves when you're dead. Another day, another hour, another night in bed. I want to live awake. I've been sleeping. Sleepwalking.
Pearl Abraham
#13. What I've found - and the older I get, the more I understand this and stand behind it - is, my whole life has been an exploration of telling the truth. It's scary to be truthful, and it's scary to reveal yourself, and I'm very attracted to doing things that scare me.
Jane Wiedlin
#14. I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.
Jerry Spinelli
#15. 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
#16. I think everyone has been annoyed at school or in their life, that's a type of bullying. So, you can take those feelings and make them bigger. But I try not to use too much from my real life, because you'll be stuck with that all day.
Kodi Smit-McPhee
#17. Life is supposed to have ups and downs. But for me, it's been more like ups and downs ... and downs ... and downs.
James Patterson
#18. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
James Baldwin
#19. The purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern. I dubbed it, 'The church of freedom from concern,' or 'FFC.
Jim Carrey
#20. I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it's never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.
Isabel Allende
#21. I'm saying that in four years, I'm going to be free, and I've never been free in my entire life." Her smile grew. "And I want to know what that feels like.
Sarah J. Maas
#22. 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
#23. In a sense,' Foucault concluded with a flourish, 'all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.
James Miller
#24. Times being like they is and all. But I figure times been hard all my life. Now don't seem so much worse'n any other.
Mildred D. Taylor
#25. The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.
Story Musgrave
#26. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#27. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#28. I didn't know my Dad - he moved out early. And my mom's politics were kind of hardscrabble. She didn't think about Democrats or Republicans. She thought about who made sense. I've been both in my life.
Dennis Miller
#29. The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#30. It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn't imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#31. 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
#32. Hats have been my thing pretty much my whole life but finance has not. I would go to the corner store and buy really cheap baseball style caps and wear those to school.
Ne-Yo
#33. I've been so ridiculous all my life that a little bit more or a little bit less hardly matters now.
Jean Rhys
#34. I've never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn't been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.
Emil Cioran
#35. I have been very lucky for most of my adult life to be working as an actor.
Josh Hopkins
#36. I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.
Eddi Reader
#37. My step-dad is probably the greatest man I've ever known. The best advice I've ever been given was when he told me to enjoy my life because one day I'm not going to be as agile as I am now.
Justin Timberlake
#38. I've endured my entire life struggling from a split personality. The problem is that the other guy, a wise guy named (Jack) ... has always been in charge.
Timothy Pina
#39. For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
#40. 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
#41. I think if you believe in past lives, I must have been an extremely deprived being. I must have been mistreated, beaten, and forced into indentured servitude because this life has just been phenomenal.
Bryan Cranston
#42. These days it's hard to meet women. Feel like my love life is finished. I been avoiding commitment. That's why I'm in this position.
Drake
#43. Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour's reading would not dissipate.
Baron De Montesquieu
#44. I've often been described more than once in my life as very much like a golden retriever. Just sort of happy and excited to do whatever it is even if it's as simple as retrieving a ball and bringing it back ad nauseum.
Chris Carmack
#45. Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#46. In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Henry Miller
#47. But I'm not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that's one of the reasons we enjoy it.
Anthony Horowitz
#48. I've been fighting every single day of my life. Sometimes I think all I have left is fight.
Jay Crownover
#49. If a man has been your teacher for a day, you should treat him as your father for the rest of his life.
Wu Cheng'en
#50. I've never been a believer in fate. I like to think I'm in control, that my life hasn't been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times.
Kyle Richardson
#52. I'm a point guard, I've always been a point guard, I've played point guard all my life. Personally, I feel the best point guards make other players look better and create their own shot. I fit in that category.
Chauncey Billups
#53. O'Reilly, I've been running from the worst of myself all my life, and now it looks like the best of me just caught up.
Mel Bossa
#54. I personally believe that I was ... a previous life or something ... a previous reincarnation, a bard of some sort, because most of the things I write about are descriptions of places I've never been to.
Marc Bolan
#55. It's [Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You"] been one of my favorite songs for my entire life.
Jane Monheit
#56. I'm weird. I'm not too focused on the physicality of a man. They just have to become my best friend, and then I start to get attracted to them. I've never been in a bar and just hit on a guy and started kissing him; I've never done that in my life.
Ana De La Reguera
#57. 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
#58. How could I have never told anyone what He had done for me? Nothing else had worked. Nothing had been able to break the chains that kept me living on the edge. Nothing ... except the gentleness of His touch.
Nikki Rosen
#59. Knowing how to make a life mean something, to wring out its worth when it was right there in one's hands instead of just wishing about it afterward, or imagining how it could have been, or should have been, different.
Deborah Reed
#60. How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I'd had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms.
Alice Hoffman
#61. Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.
Sam Harris
#62. Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction,
Bill Bryson
#63. My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column beneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#64. I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.
Marie Curie
#65. Life is precious, Jacob thought. The most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#66. People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#67. Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?
Caroline Myss
#68. What a failure her life had been. Would she have lied to God if she'd had more faith, been more righteous? How could she possibly have a son at her age? And yet, if she had believed all along . . .
Jill Eileen Smith
#69. I cry even harder, thinking of how it could have been, of how I thought it would be. For the first time, I want to give up, to die, because suddenly everything is too much and there is no solution in sight.
B.A. Paris
#70. I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be - that it will yet be, and most certainly - as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish?
Claire Messud
#71. How beautiful would history have been if it could be written beforehand and then acted out like drama!
Aihebholo-oria Okonoboh
#72. I use to think being a warning was not meant to be apart of anyone's life purpose. However, how could you teach anything in life, without the deepest understanding of what not to do? Personally, I don't want someone offering advice, unless they have been to hell and back with a map and a compass.
Shannon L. Alder
#73. Today, I will try to remember to regret the past. I will think of how many mistakes I have made throughout my life. I will say to myself, "If only I could go back in time and make different choices, so that my life could be the way it should have been." Then I will remind myself that I cannot.
John S. Hall
#74. Flying the Feathered Edge captures my life story in an authentic and accurate way. I don't know how it could have been done any better.
Bob Hoover
#75. I could have been a dental hygienist with nothing bad ever appearing in print about me, but that's not how I've chosen to lead my life. I knew that you put yourself under a microscope the more famous you become.
Julia Roberts
#76. I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.
Hermann Hesse
#77. 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
#78. I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
Roger Zelazny
#79. Had he not been the keeper of the flame, of anguish, trapped under the brilliance of what she had been to him? He had been a man of permanence, how could he have swayed to emotion like this?
Noorilhuda
#80. He was raw and sharp and rich and throbbing with life. He was sweet blood after a long hunt. How could she have mistaken Aiden's kisses for this? They had been delicious and smooth like the brief comfort of chocolate, but they had never been enough.
Annette Curtis Klause
#81. Go ahead, kill me! But live with this: All those people die!
For the rest of your life, somewhere behind the feeds, that human part of you hiding down deep will always wonder how much pain you could have prevented if you hadn't been so weak!
Rick Remender
#82. Studying the young woman's long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.
J.K. Rowling
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