Top 60 Quotes About How Things Could Have Been
#1. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.
Jeanette Winterson
#2. 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
#3. New England has two factors to get them ready to play. They've consistently been, if not the best, the second best team all year and they're playing confidently. And a lot of those guys were on field when they lost to LA. They'll take motivation in that.
Landon Donovan
#4. 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
#5. The nose has been formed to bear spectacles - thus we have spectacles.
Voltaire
#6. He who has nothing - it has been said many times - has nothing to lose but his chains.
Pablo Neruda
#7. When we can overcome our own personal battles, we can live confidently in situations we would have otherwise been too weak to handle.
Tanya R. Liverman
#8. I'm beginning to think a dictionary would have been a far more advantageous birthday gift for you."
"More advantageous than being eaten alive by a giant, carnivorous bunny? Yes, most things fall in that category, I think.
William Ritter
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.
William J. Clinton
#12. Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.
Marcus Sakey
#13. Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.
Anne Lamott
#14. Never be ashamed of where you've been, only the moment you stop trying.
L.M. Fields
#15. To say it was a dark and stormy night would be a gross understatement. It was colder than witch's kiss, wetter than a spring swamp, and blacker than a tax collector's heart. A sane man would have been curled up in front of a fire with a cup of mulled wine and a good boo-, ah, a willing wench.
Hilari Bell
#16. In elections in Iceland, I have always been an abstainer. It seems like politics is such a small bundle of self-important people, who don't have much to do with things I'm interested in.
Bjork
#17. The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.
Thomas Sowell
#18. Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?
Amos Bronson Alcott
#19. On the three pigs he and his wife own: We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn't want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.
John Mortimer
#20. I'd been beguiled by the new technology - a toddler crawling toward a gun.
Jon Ronson
#21. I've been acting for many years, and the more you do, the more confidence you get about "this is my career and this is what I'm going to be doing."
Tom Ellis
#24. For over 35 years, I've been making charitable donations anonymously.
Jerry Perenchio
#25. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#26. If I'd had fame early on, I'd have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#27. [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
#28. I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye.
Kristina Adams
#29. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
Italo Calvino
#30. The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given.
Barbara Quick
#31. 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
#32. It's been a wonderful career, I couldn't ask for anything more.
Brett Favre
#33. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#34. Concern for the environment is a central tent of Islam, yet in contemporary debates over environmental issues there has been virtually no reference made to Islamic teaching
Mawil Izzi Dien
#35. 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
#36. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
Paulo Coelho
#37. Since the outbreak of war, there has been in our country a steady increase in the consumption of spirits, wine and beer. It is estimated that in dollar volume, the annual outlay is now practically double what it was before the war.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#38. I loved fairy tales as a kid. I've always been drawn to fantasy. They're always exciting. There's never a dull moment. I just love the embellishments and the magical stuff. It's such fun to work with and to re-imagine your own way.
Gail Carson Levine
#39. I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
Sigrid Undset
#40. The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries. Why should I let two thousand years of publicity go to waste?
Cecil B. DeMille
#41. 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
#42. With a face like this, there aren't a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I've got a face that was meant for a mug shot, and that's what I've been doing for the past thirty years.
M. C. Gainey
#43. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.
Don DeLillo
#44. I've been trying for two years to read this book, and I never get past these first few pages.
Paulo Coelho
#45. Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.
Roald Dahl
#46. 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
#47. How did it die?" he asked.
"Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires."
He looked at me like I was senile.
"Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough.
Jonathan Messinger
#48. In his moments of pride he had said all those things, half in fun and half in earnest, and he began to wonder how he could have been so many kinds of a fool for so long without realising it.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
#49. The sun will rise tomorrow. It always does, and all the wishing in the world for the way things were, or for what they could have been, won't change that. It won't change how things are.
Elizabeth Scott
#50. When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.
Karan Mahajan
#51. The first step to get people interested in history is to wonder how things could have been different.
Gavriel David Rosenfeld
#52. You know, sometimes people never get to learn how successful they could have been because they give up too easily. If I've learned one thing in all my years in the business, it's that often things don't work out the way you want at first. But that doesn't mean you should give up.
Russell Simmons
#53. Have you ever been with a man who d-did those things to you?" His voice had turned husky and dark. "Talked dirty to you? Spanked you? Tied you up and sspent hours figuring out how many ways he could make you c-come with his tongue?
Ruthie Knox
#54. 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
#55. So we liked to speak our minds, but not our hearts. Too bad, because sometimes people needed to hear that. A whole mess of things could have been avoided if we just knew how to say the right thing.
Mina V. Esguerra
#56. That's how luck works, lad.
You can bitch all you like about how things could have been more favorable for you, but rest assured things can always be worse.
Always.
Scott Lynch
#57. How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#58. Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
Stephen Levine
#59. She flushed hot to remember how utterly she had given herself to him in that one consuming kiss. All her heart and mind and will had been in it, all the things she could never ever have said to him.
Anne Perry
#60. I often find things at thrift stores and library sales that I never could have been looking for. In those cases, the research is done after the fact to figure out what, exactly, I've found. It's surprising how much out there still has no online presence.
Michael Dumontier
