Top 100 Quotes About What Might Have Been
#1. Sometimes," she said, "two people pass each other by, look into each other's eyes for a moment, and all that's left is a wish. A dream of what might have been. And then they move away from each other with every step, and away from all their dreams.
Kai Meyer
#2. The first sequel thing I wrote was this 'Forever Dawn' thing that will never get out, because it's horrid. But it's a really good outline for 'Breaking Dawn' - it's very similar. I knew what I was doing, which is good, because I think if I hadn't, there might have been a lot of pressure.
Stephenie Meyer
#3. The evening air holds the bittersweet tang of what might have been,
Ally Condie
#4. One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.
Joyce Meyer
#5. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.
Lurlene McDaniel
#6. Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.
Walker Evans
#7. First, imagine taking the potentially regret - producing path of inaction. Then imagine what the very best outcome would be were you to take this risk. By picturing both scenarios in advance, you can avoid the regret of what might have been.
Wayne Dyer
#8. I was surprised that President [Barak] Obama would be so bold to come here [UK] and tell people what to do.I think a lot of people don't like him and I think if he had not said it I think you're result might have been different.
Donald Trump
#9. It's not about being upset about the things you might have said or done yesterday, which is quite appropriate at the moment. It's about looking forward rather than looking back. I hate people who look back on the past or talk about what might have been.
Noel Gallagher
#10. I have been thinking about what might happen if they installed clappers to turn on and off the lights in a concert hall. Maybe they could spare the cost of hiring some people for the next rock concert.
Linnea Gelland
#11. Time softens all griefs, they say, and it is useless to dwell on lives that might have been. We are granted only one life, and one is enough. Whom do such regrets profit? What do they achieve, except to bring us unhappiness?
Peter Hobbs
#12. I think I have probably adjusted the way I see the world, I interpret the world and I communicate the world into book format simply because of this familiarity. Possibly in another society and another context I might have been a storyteller or who knows what.
Jackie French
#13. This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.
Samuel Beckett
#14. What he has lost is everything that hasn't happened to him, everything that he is not, but might have been.
Nicola Morgan
#15. At any other time, we would have been sheep in the company of wolves. But now, we have what people might call "presence".
Susan Ee
#16. If we are ever to become what we might have been, we must cease being who we've become.
Wendell Johnson
#17. From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.
Kathleen Norris
#18. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened. - T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton
Blake Crouch
#19. For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.
Robert Browning
#20. If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.
Eileen Myles
#21. Ah me!" said he, "what might have been is not what is!
Charles Dickens
#22. You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing up on stage at the UN. It's a good question and trust me I have been asking myself the same thing. I don't know if I am qualified to be here. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better.
Emma Watson
#24. It might not have been him. But it doesn't matter, Lara Jean, because even if he didn't encourage all the talk, I doubt he discouraged it, if you know what I'm saying.
Jenny Han
#25. For when it pleased the Lord in Aug. 1829, to bring me really to the Scriptures, my life and walk became very different. And though even since that I have very much fallen short of what I might and ought to be, yet, by the grace of God, I have been enabled to live much nearer to Him than before. "If
George Muller
#26. The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space.
Neal Stephenson
#27. Life is simple, it has always been. What is complex is our brain, and that's the main reason why we perceive life as being complicated. Embrace life for what you have and embrace life for who you are, as what you have others might envy and who you are might be secretly being admired by millions.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
#28. Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be.
Hillary Clinton
#29. It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.
Alice McDermott
#30. The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
Kingsley Amis
#31. Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
Arnold Bennett
#33. You learn not to think about what might have been, and to just appreciate what you have.
Jonathan Tropper
#34. It's me, it's been me all along and I might have saved your life, but I would be nothing if it wasn't for you. I would be just another mech-droid and I wouldn't know what's like to love someone so much I would give up everything for them.
Marissa Meyer
#35. What did the poet say? That the saddest words of tongue or pen were what might have been?
Charles Todd
#36. It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Jerry Garcia
#37. As she realized what might have been, she grew to be thankful for what was.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#38. Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.
Chaim Potok
#39. We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.
George Eliot
#40. I'm not paralyzed by fear about what might have been or what might be. I'm grateful for what is and I make excellent use of what I've got.
Linda Gray
#41. To be perfectly frank, his ding-dong wouldn't have been what you might call the subject of an exhaustive search. Albert
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#42. No one has the right to judge you, because no one really knows what you have been through. They might have heard the stories, but they didn't feel what you felt in your heart.
G.M.B. Akash
#43. Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are ...
Dean Koontz
#44. I'm alive. This might be the first time I've ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.
Gregory Sherl
#45. You want to know what price I asked for forgiving Arobynn, Celaena?" Sam stood so still the he might have been a statue. "My price was his oath that he'd never lay a hand on you again. I told him I'd forgive him in exchange for that.
Sarah J. Maas
#46. No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.
Aldrich Ames
#47. No star is ever lost we once have seen, we always may be what we might have been.
Adelaide Anne Procter
#48. You can't dwell on what might have been ... and it's not fair to condemn him for something he hasn't done.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#49. You do what you do and you pay for your sins and there's no such thing as what might have been.
Tim McGraw
#50. Lil had always believed that a person's duty was to make the best of the hand they were dealt. No use wondering what might have been, she used to say, all that matters is what is.
Kate Morton
#51. When women get together, they tell stories. This is how it has always been. Telling stories is our way of saying who we are, where we have come from, what we know, and where we might be headed.
Jalaja Bonheim
#52. He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.
Jack Finney
#53. Child," said Aslan, "did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what might have been?
C.S. Lewis
#54. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#55. The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are..
Jon Krakauer
#56. Alan Rickman had to drop into a blue screen stretched over a bag. It might have been 30 feet, which is plenty scary. You'd break your back, especially if you were untrained, but this is the thing about it: What you see on his face when he lets go is real fear. It's one of the greatest shots ever.
Brian Abrams
#57. If I would have been in a different world Like I frequently am when I see you Oh I might have missed All the ways you try to give If only you knew what you do to me Sometimes I think about eternity If it would have been another time I wonder what you would of had in mind
Ric Ocasek
#58. My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest.
Sarah Dessen
#59. I'm kind of happy to know there may be some kid or teenager now who might never have had the chance to see my Broadway performance, but gets a taste for what it might have been like now, because they can see Clint Eastwood's film.
John Lloyd Young
#60. You can't become who you're supposed to be if you keep looking back on what might have been. - Alexis
Candace Knoebel
#61. I doubt you've been idle these last twenty-four hours, so tell me what I need to know and who I might have to kill to protect her.
Vanessa Kelly
#62. I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.
Marilynne Robinson
#63. I wanted to say something to him about regret, about how I didn't really believe in the idea of regret because it was always based on what might have happened. People always held up the now, the concrete now, and compared it to what might have been, and that wasn't a fair comparison.
Kim Culbertson
#64. He might have been a thief and a liar and a cheat, but he was a good person.
Judy Blundell
#65. I'd love to be in Paul McCartney's shoes for a day. I'd love to pick up a guitar and write songs like he does. Or to experience what it might have been like to be a Beatle for a day.
Tom Felton
#66. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.
Charles Dickens
#67. There is a wealth of unexpressed love in the world. It is one of the chief causes of sorrow evoked by death: what might have been said or might have been done that never can be said or done.
Arthur Hopkins
#68. I will always remember what my life might have been like if i had married a man who loved me with undying passion. perhaps i might not have been so vunerabel to the attension of a rake.
Julianne MacLean
#69. If I make a wrong decision, I worry what might have been. I stress out over very insignificant things.
Courtney Barnett
#70. You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.
Richard Martin Stern
#71. She could not tell him that she protested because she did not believe he loved her enough to become his wife. It was no ordinary man but the Prince of Light who was asking her to be his bride. And, she thought gloomily, what sacrifice might she have disregarded had his gaze been only for her?
Noriko Ogiwara
#72. There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#73. As a cancer survivor, I am very aware of how many wasted minutes I don't have. The surest way to waste what is left of your life is to worry about what might happen or what might have been.
Shelley Hamlin
#74. You talk to me of choices?' said Reinhardt. 'I only know that the choices life makes you take strip away the person we wanted to be. Builds us up into something we never wanted. Until you look back on life, and you see that the track of your life is a scar that hides what might have been.
Luke McCallin
#75. And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.
H. Rider Haggard
#76. George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon,
Hunter S. Thompson
#77. But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?
Lucia Berlin
#78. What I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it
might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.
Douglas Coupland
#79. I do feel as if I'm living a blessed life at the moment. I've been thinking about the phrase 'living a dream,' because that's exactly what is happening. I'm just trying to go with the flow and take each day as it comes, otherwise I might freak out at all the things that have happened recently.
Katherine Jenkins
#80. I can be happy with who I am, not what I should be, or what I might have been, or what someone tells me I must be.
Janet Jackson
#81. If you listen to your fears, you will die never knowing what a great person you might have been.
Robert H. Schuller
#82. When people get disillusioned and get insecure and content about the future, they tend to brood about what might have been.
Dave Davies
#83. So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
Marian Wright Edelman
#84. I had to know if I could make it somewhere else. I did not want to go through the rest of my life wondering what might have been without putting myself to the test.
Kenny Dalglish
#85. I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.
Anne Sexton
#86. Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?
Joyce G. Baldwin
#87. One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
Peter Greenaway
#88. There might've been wires, but I have this ability to make myself light. Well you know what, in ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it's all up in the head.
Albert Finney
#89. What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
T. S. Eliot
#90. Republican party leaders have been worrying about the damage a [Donald] Trump nomination could do to the party, but also what might happen if he left the GOP and took his supporters with him. But Trump said he would stay a Republican and do everything in his power to beat Hillary Clinton.
Ted Cruz
#91. But I will agree that I think that things happen with people in relationships, that you might have been able to enjoy Morocco, say, if you weren't getting out of a bad marriage. You know what I mean?
Robert Downey Jr.
#92. I wish to Heaven that I might forget. It would be so much easier than to go through life always remembering what might have been.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#93. What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp.
George Washington
#94. Think of what is and don't let what might have been distract you.
Robin Hobb
#95. Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.
Ian Fleming
#96. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.
We are only what might have been ...
Charles Lamb
#97. One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#99. I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can't bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day.
Lucy Walker
#100. There's no point dwelling on what might or could have been. You just have to go forward.
Jack Nicholson
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