Quotes About Should Have Been

#1. Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we've been blessed despite the fact that we probably haven't been the blessing that we should have been.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#2. Life had given me another sucker punch. I should have been used to it. I should have already known what was happening and what would happen. How it felt to be in the dark hole that was death.

Holly Hood

#3. Dr Johnson said, the inscription should have been in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent, should be.

James Boswell

#4. I guess I will never come back all the way, a fog will always stand between the person I am and the person I should have been.

Sophie Glynn

#5. 'Rick' never really fit. I tried for 18 years to make it work, and no one wanted to call me Rick. It should always have been Ricky. That's what it always should have been, so I'm going back to it.

Ricky Schroder

#6. Why had I taken all those useless classes like bio and German when I should have been taking lipreading?

Meg Cabot

#7. I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway..

Sylvia Plath

#8. Love you. That should have been simple enough to say. But the words stuck hard in my throat. I'd never said them to anyone I didn't lose,

Jim Butcher

#9. I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Doris Lessing

#10. That's what forgiving was: seeing someone for what they were, flaws and all, not what you wanted them to be, not what they should have been.

B.G. Harlen

#11. Once I should have been, if not satisfied, partially, at least, contented with suffrage for the intelligent and those who have been soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice.

Salmon P. Chase

#12. Hollywood is the gold cap on a tooth that should have been pulled out years ago.

W.C. Fields

#13. I love the smell of Chai Tea in the morning... (What should have been said in "Apocalypse Now")

Sakinaa Davies

#14. The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

Christopher Hitchens

#15. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Haruki Murakami

#16. That I'd been letting life act itself out on me when I should have been directing it.

Catherine McKenzie

#17. Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness - there was always folks stupid enough to say, Where there's smoke there's fire, when the saying should have been, Where there's scandalous lies there's always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence.

Orson Scott Card

#18. Sure. I've been involved with a couple women who should have been committed.

Paul Levine

#19. Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.

Kurt Vonnegut

#20. Equestrian, by the by, is the gayest word in the English language. In fact, I thought Brokeback Mountain should have been called Two Equestrians.

Lewis Black

#21. Barbara had really missed her calling. She should have been a gynecologist. Nothing pleased her more than having her face between another woman's legs.

Elysia N. Fields

#22. By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled ...
Nothing of this sort happened.

B.M. Bower

#23. Our enemies, like the Grecian hero, have one vulnerable point. You have not touched it yet. What should have been their element of weakness has been suffered to remain an element of strength.

Jay Alan Sekulow

#24. It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.

Benjamin Franklin

#25. There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.

Christian Bale

#26. And you dared to go counter to your father's wishes? They should have been a command to you. Give me one reason, only one, why, flinging decency to the winds, you demeaned yourself by becoming a baker.'
'Hunger.

W. Somerset Maugham

#27. I felt I should have been taught about the landmine problem. It made me suddenly realize certain things about the world and how much I had to learn, like the history of the people.

Angelina Jolie

#28. My game wasn't where it should have been at all at the start of the year. I got into a couple of bad habits on my swing, and it just took me a little bit of time to get out of them.

Rory McIlroy

#29. Weight is just not a hot button. In fact, during my life, it probably should have been on my radar screen a bit more. I look back at work photos and am shocked. Was I eating the people I was interviewing?! Good Lord, I was big.

Hoda Kotb

#30. Well, if that's how it happened, I don't like how Etain was never given a choice. Both Midhir and Eochaid should have been kicked in the marble bag for behaving like her hoo-ha was something they could buy and sell" ~ Granuaile

Kevin Hearne

#31. The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people's private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.

Jose Serrano

#32. did I mention my first kiss was extracted by someone who never should have been that lucky?

Olena Kalytiak Davis

#33. I should have been sorry for her, at any other time; but for now if they had laid her and ten more ladies like her down upon the floor and told me my way out was across their backs, I'd have run it with clogs on.

Sarah Waters

#34. Its better to be second while everyone is saying You should have been first than be first when everyone says You should be second.

Karina Smirnoff

#35. Ask yourself why Aemon Targaryan was allowed to waste his life upon the Wall when by rights he should have been raised to archmaester. His blood was why. He could not be trusted.

George R R Martin

#36. It was not a friendly game, and Jerry certainly did not have friendliness in his eyes. He had an extra mean streak that day. He was out of control and probably should have been ejected.

Roger Staubach

#37. There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding.

Cheryl Strayed

#38. You told me I wrote that poem because I was afraid of dealing with myself. And I used my mom as an excuse, accusing her of not appreciating or accepting me, when I should have been saying those words into a mirror.

Jay Asher

#39. W-what are you?"
Selena looked down at her rival. "What you should have been and never were. The Queen of the Witches.

Anne Bishop

#40. Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over.

Sarah Dessen

#41. It was one of the most disgusting spectacles I've ever seen
this white-haired old man, who should have been thinking of the hereafter, standing there lying like an actor.

P.G. Wodehouse

#42. In any just world, I should have been able to kick the front room door open, like Lord Flashheart in Blackadder, and shout "OH YEAH. THAT HYMEN'S GONE. DON'T YOU WORRY ABOUT THAT," and then run round the room, getting high fives from my parents and siblings.

Caitlin Moran

#43. A student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corriders ... looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the bible to fill in the spaces where their personalitites should have been.

Kate Atkinson

#44. I know I should have been grateful because it was a very nice thing to do. But I wasn't grateful. I wasn't grateful at all. Don't get me wrong. I acted like I was. But I wasn't. To tell you the truth, I was starting to get mad.

Stephen Chbosky

#45. I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

Marcel Proust

#46. No, I was not going to work. I was an artist, a lover, a lover of women, of the oppressed and downtrodden, a warrior really. I should have been somewhere leading an armed revolution in the name of love and no, I was not going to work.

Michelle Tea

#47. Kaltain Rompier had just turned the tide of this war.
Dorian had never been more ashamed of himself.
He should have been better. Should have seen better. They all should have.

Sarah J. Maas

#48. That should have been my strategy! By the time I've worked through the emotions of surprise, admiration, anger, jealousy, and frustration, I'm watching that reddish mane of hair disappear into the trees well out of shooting range.

Suzanne Collins

#49. I never knew you had such a fine eye for fabrics," I said as we continued up the street. "You should have been a tailor instead of a thief."
"I have a fine eye for all things, amira, which is why I'm a thief and not a tailor.

Heidi Heilig

#50. When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I'd never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.

Gary Numan

#51. In another situation, and in an active station in life, I should have been keenly occupied, and the founding of an order would have never come into my head.

Adam Weishaupt

#52. You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer."
"I sometimes think I should have been a good one."
"Why?"
"Because I am patient.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

#53. One day it would be over for all, that terrible dream of everlasting changes that held us to a place that never should have been if its greatest intention led only to wallowing in the muck of eternity.

Thomas Ligotti

#54. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)

Winston S. Churchill

#55. Where were you?" Shahrzad tried to control the tremor in her voice.
"Not where I should have been."
"This morning and last night."
His breath fanned on her skin as he bent toward her ear. "This morning, I was not where I should have been. Last night, I was not where I wanted to be.

Renee Ahdieh

#56. Prayer has been the saviour of my life. Without it I should have been a lunatic long ago.

Mahatma Gandhi

#57. Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward ... this baby that I bleed.

Anne Sexton

#58. If I had not smoked I should have been dead ten years ago.

Francois Guizot

#59. Argument against free will defence: There are some who, while no less free than others, would never knowingly harm another person, and it is surely conceivable that everyone should have been like that.

Unknown

#60. Grief should have been all-consuming. I hated myself that it wasn't. But sometimes I forgot. Jesus, how could I fucking forget? Sometimes I went for minutes without remembering my dad was dead, but that whole time it was regrouping so it could hit me all over again.

Lisa Henry

#61. None OF Days Are Ever Promised ... So Don't Waste Another, Being Angry And Upset Over What Was Done To You, You Don't Have Or Should Have Been.

Timothy Pina

#62. An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed, he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted.

Donald Cram

#63. He smiles. it nearly breaks my heart. I know that smile. It's a memory that's tainted, something that should have been happy but didn't turn out that way.

H.M. Ward

#64. I can see that you spoke in ignorance, and I bitterly regret that I should have been so petty as to take offence where none was intended.

T.H. White

#65. I think, as a nation, we didn't learn our lessons from the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. We should have been more careful in a whole host of areas.

Raymond Kelly

#66. Lucien sighed as he looked me over. "Do you ever stop being so serious and dull?" "Do you ever stop being such a prick?" I snapped back. Dead - really, truly, I should have been dead for that. But Lucien grinned at me. "Much better." Alis, it seemed, had not been wrong.

Sarah J. Maas

#67. I should have been thinking more about my family, how I raised my children, how I maintained life's work, so to speak.

Joe Namath

#68. To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.

Per Petterson

#69. I was a good Indian girl, but naughty in that I would often sneak out of the back door and into the garden and go off with my friends when I should have been at home cooking or cleaning.

Gurinder Chadha

#70. Ayla should have been the son of my mate. Brun to Broud, Clan of the Cave Bear.

Jean M. Auel

#71. This is the part of the story where we should have been caught, but we weren't. If we'd been found, and punished, I'd probably be telling a different story. A better one? I doubt that. A couple of us would have been spared some pain, but there was no escaping all of it.

Sarah Domet

#72. I don't just look at things as an actor. I've also written several films, so I look at it as a storyteller and I know if something worked and should have been in there for the benefit of the story and the benefit of the character.

Charlie Hunnam

#73. That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit.

Emile Durkheim

#74. One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

Norman Ralph Augustine

#75. And Robb. Robb who had been more a brother to Theon than any son born of Balon Greyjoy's loins. Murdered at the Red Wedding, butchered by the Freys. I should have been with him. Where was I? I shold have died with him.

George R R Martin

#76. So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.

Francis Collins

#77. Things should have been
so different
to the way they are
now.

Emma Cameron

#78. Once you have done with school, you realise that it is just a smaller version of life, and really I have felt that I should have been an adult since I was aged about five.

Kristen Stewart

#79. If it had not been for the English I should have been emperor of the East, but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find them in our way.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#80. Oh, you're in television! That's interesting. No, I mean, the word television is interesting. It's a hybrid, you see: tele- comes from the greek, and -vision comes from the latin. It should have been either "telerama", or "procolvision".

Graham Chapman

#81. They knew there was no innocence left to corrupt - just a hollowed out space where my soul should have been. I

Skye Warren

#82. The sexy magazine in Britain in that time was called Club International. Club International: It was about as international as the International House of Pancakes. It should have been called Naked Cockney Girls with Scurvy.

Craig Ferguson

#83. Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London ... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#84. Yes, I am white now,' said Gandalf. 'Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#85. I should have been trying to build a career, rather than leaving it in the hands of somebody else.

Ray Walston

#86. I'd never driven a Porsche in my life and it made me nervous to drive one now, but I realized I could get used to driving a luxury sports car pretty darn quick. I really should have been born into royalty.

Tiffany Snow

#87. I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.

Whitney Cummings

#88. Promises are like silly jokes, told around a table when the food is good and no one has anything to lose by telling a lie or two - lies should have been a synonym for the word 'promise' in dictionaries, but only a few people knew it.

Cameron Jace

#89. Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

John Sayles

#90. Have you noticed how every tree is different here? All twisted by the wind and snow, but if that was all, they should have been twisted in the same way. It's as though every tree has made up its own mind exactly how it wants to grow.

Jackie French

#91. Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.

Mordecai Richler

#92. I should have been out there having a wild time like all the other girls my age, but I wasn't. I was going home every night to what was, initially, a very happy marriage.

Amanda Holden

#93. It was easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.

James S.A. Corey

#94. If you read the history of the national Socialist party, they're all people who felt like life should have been better to them. They're disappointed, vengeful, angry.

Alan Furst

#95. But the sin of Adam and Eve brought about a new kind of work as part of the punishment for sin. Work was now more difficult, painful, and less productive than it should have been. It brought sweat, fatigue, and toil never intended for us by our Creator.

John Hart

#96. We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all-that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.

Margaret Sanger

#97. He'd woken up to the absence of Mathilde in the bed, grief in the coolness where her heat should have been.

Lauren Groff

#98. Time snapped and Hagerty found himself speeding toward the woman in the straitjacket. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he pulled her off the corpse and held her at arm's length. He caught a glimpse of Kalish's face and the shredded mess where his throat should have been.

Nancy A. Collins

#99. I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

Alice James

#100. So when I say we had been the cowards, yes, that's what I meant, we as a society. And that's everybody, including myself. I had been screaming about the drug war and this war and other wars. I should have been more on terrorism, too. So should you, so should everybody.

Bill Maher