Top 100 Quotes About Might Have Been
#1. I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted - if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie
#2. None of us can know how poor we are in comparison with what we might have been if we had lived habitually nearer to God in prayer.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#3. In all troublous events we may find comfort, though it be only in the negative admission that things might have been worse.
Amelia Barr
#4. It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon's ass.
Tom Robbins
#5. 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
#6. I wish that after the war against Saddam Hussein we had been more effective at rebuilding Iraq quickly. I think had we done it from the provinces, in, rather than from Baghdad, out, we might have been more successful.
Condoleezza Rice
#7. We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely
C.S. Lewis
#8. Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled.
She snapped the box closed.
She didn't scream. She didn't run. She didn't faint.
There might have been a little crying.
But mostly ... she danced.
Cora Carmack
#9. So I'm an ace?' Will grinned. 'I'm flattered Halt, flattered. I had no idea you regarded me so highly.'
Halt gave him a long-suffering look. 'I might have been more accurate to say a joker.'
Whatever you say.
John Flanagan
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. If you truly feel that self esteem and motivation have to happen first before you can make changes in your life, then we'll probably be sharing walkers at a retirement home as we talk over what might have been.
Shannon L. Alder
#13. Lila Bard might have been a thief but she wasn't a beggar. And
V.E Schwab
#14. 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
#15. Our past might have been rocky, but I think our future's inevitable.
Lynetta Halat
#16. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the Heavens, yet everything had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumberable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tullips with wings.
Edgar Allan Poe
#17. Axum might have been her first love. He might have part of her heart forever. But she's a different woman now, and that woman chose you. You've got the upper hand because you're here. If you still want her, fight for her. If you're not willing to do that, you don't deserve her." Using
Kirsten Beyer
#19. And but for the company of these little objects which I picked up here and there, when out walking, and which sometimes gave me the impression that they too needed me, I might have been reduced to the society of nice people or to the consolations of some religion or other, but I think not.
Samuel Beckett
#20. I've speculated about what my life might have been like as a musician, but I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that I probably would've either been teaching piano or maybe gotten to play at Nordstrom's department store.
Condoleezza Rice
#21. Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. I might have been asked to moderate my attitude a time or two. But really, life was too short to take shit. Let people walk all over you and you got what you deserved. I'd learned that the hard way.
Kylie Scott
#23. Her words might have been meant for another, but they had the quality of sunlight nonetheless.
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#24. 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
#25. I don't spend any time whatsoever thinking about what might have been.
Alex Trebek
#26. You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
Francis Ford Coppola
#27. It's just the way things are. And you can't dwell on what might have been. You have to look at what is.
Sophie Kinsella
#28. Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for what might have been
Arthur Ransome
#29. I was always a neat kid. I never wanted my hands dirty. I wasn't a dirty kid. A lot of kids like to run around. If I was rolling around the dirt, I went home and took a shower. That's just the way I was. I'm not sure. I might have been born with it.
Mark Teixeira
#30. Closing in on three hundred pounds, the woman with her in lockup looked like a Sumo wrestler squeezed into a bright, lime-green spandex outfit. She might have been a jogger, but her garish makeup suggested otherwise.
Alex Archer
#31. You might have been enough the man you are, with striving less to be so
William Shakespeare
#32. 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
#33. (..) and they would imprint upon each other's lips such a long and languishing kiss, that a little straw cigar might have been smoked during the time it lasted.
Nikolai Gogol
#34. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.
James S.A. Corey
#35. It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.
Barbara Kingsolver
#36. Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld often reflected on how fortunate he was to be exactly who he was, and nobody else. When one paused to think who one might have been had the accident of birth not happened precisely as it did, then, well, one could be quite frankly appalled.
Alexander McCall Smith
#37. But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.
Geoffrey Rush
#38. 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
#39. I have to admit my Elomi bridal lingerie was exquisite. I'd been so certain it would wow Chris, spur him into some post-matrimonial lustfulness. What a joke. A strap-on might have been a better idea.
Kylie Scott
#40. Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don't think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you're a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.
Colin Firth
#41. Every so often we long to steal to the land of what-might-have-been. But that doesn't soften the ache we feel when reality sets back in.
Stephen Schwartz
#42. You can't afford to think about what might have been. You just be aware of what is.
Noel Gallagher
#43. If I could take a punch like that, I might have been able to think up a name besides George for all my sons.
George Foreman
#44. He went on like that for a while, and before he was done, Lucas had dismissed him as being ineffectually goofy, although his ideas about the killing were roughly the same as Lucas's own. Holly said he had no idea who on the staff might have been involved with Tubbs, or might be working as a spy.
John Sandford
#45. There's always something in the game you wish you would have done different. That's why players improve, because they learn from what they did before. They might have been guessing before, but now they know.
Gordie Howe
#46. Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.
Tony Hillerman
#47. If I hadn't fought back, I might have been Gidget forever.
Sally Field
#48. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.
Edgar Allan Poe
#49. She had maintained her strength in the face of all this for so long that we had come to take it for granted, but she wasn't bulletproof. She might have been peculiar, but she was also human.
Ransom Riggs
#50. Society might have been better off without them, but we are supposed to look after the disadvantaged, and so we do it. But it doesn't help the society.
Gerry Harvey
#51. How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners.
Gerald Heaney
#52. No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. For a moment ... I might have been the daughter she'd hoped for ... she might have been my teacher and my guide ... We might never have been enemies at all.
Naomi Novik
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. If I'd been there, I might have been able to do something. But I wasn't, and I lost them."
"And if you'd been there," Ty said softly, "I would have lost you.
Abigail Roux
#57. But the condemned man looked so submissively doglike that it seemed as if he might have been allowed to run free on the slopes and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.
Franz Kafka
#58. She said a good day ain't got no rain
She said a bad day is when I lie in the bed
And I think of things that might have been
Paul Simon
#59. Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a dictator, but, he was a Dominican dictator, which is another way of saying he was the number-one bellaco in the country.
Junot Diaz
#60. To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
Chester Barnard
#61. In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started. If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today, but we might not have even got there.
Bob Kahn
#62. I was attracted to the strangeness of his mind as a psychiatrist might have been drawn to an interesting case. he wanted a resident analyst. Neither of us understood.
Elizabeth Harrower
#63. Elizabeth's doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man's dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there's a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.
Stephen King
#64. She might have been there for you in the aftermath, but I was there when everything came crashing down.
Megan Duke
#65. No real lady would let a dress that might have been worn by a stranger touch her skin.
Cassandra Clare
#66. There are quite a few things I've done that even I thought might have been one step too far. But if you are willing to make a fool of yourself and make people smile, as long as you do it with a sense of fun, you can get away with it.
Richard Branson
#67. We can't live our lives according to what might have been. We have to live by what is.
Terry Goodkind
#68. I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.
Stephen Rea
#69. 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
#70. I'd rather be a 'could-be' if I cannot be an 'are' because a 'could-be' is a 'maybe' who is reaching for a star. I'd rather be a 'has-been' than a 'might-have-been' by far; for a 'might-have-been' has never been, but a 'has' was once an 'are.
Milton Berle
#71. If you love her, then love the woman you see, not the woman you suppose, presume, assume, and surmise that she might have been.
Ilya Atani
#72. 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
#73. I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.
Gail Godwin
#74. I could have been on a path that led to different, more traditional teen romance, and 'Nip/Tuck' shook me loose from any generalization I might have been forced into. It helped me understand I wanted to take on things that were edgier, more challenging and riskier.
Seth Gabel
#75. He did have to flush the toilet though, since I hadn't gotten to that yet. I had only peed, otherwise I might have been mortified. Best friend or not, shit was still shit.
Scarlett Dawn
#76. I love what I'm doing. And the world is so mad at everybody. If I do something to make people smile, I'm going to say, I got you. For that moment, if it don't last, I made you forget about the other thing you might have been thinking about.
Buddy Guy
#77. Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.
Laini Taylor
#78. God might have been either drunk or naughty when he was creating women.
M.F. Moonzajer
#79. I might have been sad for them if they weren't so disgustingly happy.
Cecily White
#81. 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
#82. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.
Adolf Hitler
#83. Mr. Ford's decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency.
Scott Shane
#84. 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
#85. The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Ian Fleming
#86. Their explanations might have been completely legitimate, or they might have been sesquipedalian bushwa.
Orson Scott Card
#87. 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
#88. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people's experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one's life been different.
Virginia Woolf
#89. The knights were disgusted. They said that all that fiddle-faddle was well enough for saints, or might have been a thousand years ago, but the Lord Jesus would certainly be the first to command Christians to kill pagans. Rumon announced that he did not think so.
Anya Seton
#90. I can't stop thinking about what might have been ... I can't stop imagining the two of us together. My body burns at the thought of it. Sephy and I might've been together for ever.
- Callum McGregor
Malorie Blackman
#91. But only at Antquarium did I feel a sense of what the library at Alexandria might have been: an accumulation of evidence and suggestions.
Amy Halloran
#92. It has been remarked that almost every character which has excited either attention or pity has owed part of its success to merit, and part to a happy concurrence of circumstances in its favor. Had Caesar or Cromwell exchanged countries, the one might have been a sergeant and the other an exciseman.
Oliver Goldsmith
#93. The man I thought I might have been waiting for my whole life. All this time he'd been standing right in front of me, wearing a suit and a sexy-ass smile.
Samantha Young
#94. He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.
Michael Dobbs
#95. It might have been minutes or it might have been hours; time slept when swords woke.
George R R Martin
#96. Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#97. It's never too late to be the person you might have been. ~George Eliot
A.J. Warner
#98. I might have been through some changes, but changing the way I look wasn't one of the major ones. To be honest. I'm sick of the whole subject of my hair. I mean, are you just sitting there looking at my hair, or are you looking at me?
Jon Bon Jovi
#99. But let's not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.
Kate DiCamillo
#100. 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
