Quotes About What We Can't Have

#1. We want what we can't have, even when we have no right to demand it.

Brandon Sanderson

#2. I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'

'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.

'No, I mean how can he not want me?

Olivia Sudjic

#3. We want what we can't have. It's human nature.

Cora Carmack

#4. Just because as human beings, what we can't have is what we reply in our head over and over again before we go to sleep.

Taylor Swift

#5. We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love

Wong Kar-Wai

#6. Discontentment shows up when we focus on what we can't have rather than what we do have.

Emily P. Freeman

#7. Next to me, Saiman smiled.
We all want what we can't have, Kate. I want you, you want love, and he wants to break my neck.

Ilona Andrews

#8. We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

Charles De Lint

#9. Yahweh: You've been unhappy because you've desired things that cannot be.
Lucifer: That's what desire IS. The need for what we can't have. The need for what's readily available is called greed.

Mike Carey

#10. We spend a big hunk of our lifetimes contemplating what we can't have, what we don't want and what's missing in our lives. What we have to learn is to put our attention and focus on contemplating what it is we would like to attract, and not on what is missing.

Wayne Dyer

#11. Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.

T. S. Eliot

#12. I can't help but feel, across oceans and vast fields we will connect again. What we share is too rare to let go of for good but sometimes we have to accept, the timing isn't right.

Nikki Rowe

#13. I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we?

Aaron Spelling

#14. We all have great things on our bucket lists like skydiving, seeing the Northern Lights etc, but what about simply falling in love? Isn't that the most amazing thing we can do?

Walt Whitman

#15. Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get.

Miguel Syjuco

#16. We were girls once. As hard as that is to believe. //Oh you can't see it now--our bodies have stretched and sagged, faces and necks drooping. That's what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it's from and where it'll return.

Brit Bennett

#17. Anything has a rhythm to it, comedy or drama. There has to be a musicality to it. And everybody can't play the same instrument, ideally. But I think that we all have the same comedic tendencies, and that's why it works. We all sort of agree with what's funny.

Bradley Cooper

#18. Why do we live in a time where we only say what we feel when it's too late? We have evolved. We can split atoms and cure diseases and travel to other planets. Yet we can't say how we feel. We can't tell one another who we really are and be accepted for it.

M. Jonathan Lee

#19. I wonder if gratefulness is the bridge from sorrow to joy, spanning the chasm of our anxious striving. Freed from the burden of unbridled desires, we can enjoy what we have, celebrate what we've attained, and appreciate the familiar. For if we can't be happy now, we'll likely not be happy when.

Philip Gulley

#20. I think the things I wanted answered have been answered by people in the know that we can't talk about, so I'm perfectly happy with how Chewie came to be where he is and what is going on in Episode III.

Peter Mayhew

#21. A lot of people have said my movies are all the same. But I don't actually make an effort to have a style. I'm usually just thinking of what can we do to make it funnier or more interesting or just kind of refine it and it ends up like that.

Wes Anderson

#22. This life we have is a process of becoming holy. Though Christ is the redeemer, it's up to us to have a relationship with God. Without a relationship, we'll always be lacking and trying to find fulfillment in this world, and we know what the world offers can never satisfy our need.

T.K. Chapin

#23. We have won freedom, he brooded, but if we abuse it, or vote for cheap personal advantage, it won't be worth having. We are familiar with the abuses of kings, but because what we now attempt is new, we can't foresee its abuses. They'll come.

James A. Michener

#24. Happiness doesn't depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel toward what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much.

William D. Hoard

#25. We have a history," I say, "that no one can take from us. No matter what happened in the past, no matter what happens from here, it can't take away from the good thing we had. You were my first love, Demi. You only get one.

Winter Renshaw

#26. All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.

P.D. James

#27. That's what separates out American democracy from dictators and horrible governments across the world and the reason why that works is that we have a president that can consult with congress before making big decisions. That doesn't just make a unilateral decision to go in for military conflict.

Charles R. Chamberlain

#28. I ask a million questions, and I insist on having answers. I think that is what we have to do. I have to know what the director wants. Some are very much in their head, and I need to force it out of them. I just can't play around for eight hours and see if something happens.

Mads Mikkelsen

#29. I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.

Phife Dawg

#30. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.

Stanislaw Lem

#31. Any perception can connect us to reality, properly and fully. What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything.

Chogyam Trungpa

#32. I want to be around you whenever I can. Doesn't matter what we're doing. You don't have to take your clothes off to get my attention. All you have to do is look my way. Exist.

Ranae Rose

#33. If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.

Michelle Alexander

#34. It doesn't have to be this way, Charlie. You're allowed to love me, despite what your father says. You're allowed to be happy. What you can't allow is for negativity to choke you until we no longer breathe the same air.

Colleen Hoover

#35. What I enjoy doing is challenging stereotypes of what people believe a Tory must be. You don't have to say every Tory is in it for themselves - it's pathetic caricaturing that has no place in the 21st century, and if we can challenge that stereotype, then great.

Louise Mensch

#36. And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?

Garth Risk Hallberg

#37. Most of us have never allowed ourselves to want what we truly want because we can't see how it's going to manifest.

Jack Canfield

#38. They have our bundles split open in museums / our dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can't steal / is what we know.

Chrystos

#39. What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn't we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.)

Jo Walton

#40. El, you are telling me to run away with a man to become his mistress."
"I am telling you to be happy. Even if it lasts only a little while. We must snatch what we can when we have the chance. Life is so very lonely when we don't.

Jennifer Ashley

#41. Magic is what we invent when we want something we think we can't have.

Sarah Addison Allen

#42. I know what a human brain preserved in formaldehyde looks like," I said, "We've got to get out of here. Go to the party, act as though nothing's happened. He can't suspect that we know."

"How can I act like papa doesn't have a brain in a hatbox?

Megan Shepherd

#43. So the audience, at times, lets us know actually what is so special about the show that we can't even necessarily design or predict. Which is great. That's what you want art to be. You want it to be alive and to actually have a life in the way it's viewed.

Steve Zissis

#44. We all struggle with what's right and wrong, Paxon. That's the nature of our lives. We have to figure out what we can live with, and hope that what we do to bring it about doesn't exact a cost that's too high. We have to decide where to draw the line.

Terry Brooks

#45. Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.

David Vann

#46. We don't know what's going to happen this summer or who's going to be here next year. We have no control over any of that. So, we're going to play our [22 remaining] games and do the best we can and show up for the New York Knick fans. That's the most important thing.

Jalen Rose

#47. Don't let the low standards and expectations of the world and others cause you to aim beneath your nobility and ability-dream big! What I know and have learned is that anything worth doing is not easy and that we can do anything that is not easy if we believe.

Elaine S. Dalton

#48. Though we may have desires or bold goals, for whatever reason, most of us don't think we can achieve something beyond what we're qualified to achieve. Why, I ask, do we let reality interfere with our dreams?

Simon Sinek

#49. I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

Aidan Gillen

#50. Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.

Saul Bellow

#51. We have to feed our loved ones, but at what cost. A dead man or woman can't feed the living.

James Jean-Pierre

#52. Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone
childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

Judith Viorst

#53. That's why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can't trust your mind to tell you what's right and wrong.

Tana French

#54. People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations with these things. That's what I think.

Haruki Murakami

#55. I don't know what's coming next and neither does anyone else. It's something that we do have to face but the thing is that a lot of people don't want to face it. And there's denial. If somebody says it, like me, everybody feels a little better that they can discuss it.

Art Buchwald

#56. This isn't a thrift store ... We're not selling them something less expensive, we're selling them something more special. We have to tell them the story of what we're showing them. And then we have to show them how they can be the new heroine in the story.

Erin McKean

#57. You can be very independent, but admit to wanting somebody close to you and that's what me and my wife have. We don't need each other but we want to be with each other and I think it's important to educate the kids with that.

Boris Kodjoe

#58. We can't spend our lives wondering, 'what if?' We must simply make the best of what we have. -Lady Mary Wynne-Jones

Eve Silver

#59. I'm just sick of the way things are. We're in an age in which we can't live without accepting the logic of the market. Contemporary politics is all about short-term pragmatism. We have abandoned religion and philosophy ... What we have left is the automatisation of doing what the market tells us.

Jose Mujica

#60. I don't want to ruin our friendship and what we have but I cannot for another minute stand in front of you without you knowing exactly how I feel. Because I can't see past you. You are everything to me.

Elizabeth Eulberg

#61. In the long run, our most deeply held desires will govern our choices, one by one and day by day, until our lives finally add up to what we have really wanted most
for good or otherwise. We can indeed have eternal life, if we really want it, so long as we don't want something else more.

Bruce C. Hafen

#62. You can't take it for granted. Even if we have two, three days off I still have to blow that horn a few hours to keep up the chops. I mean I've been playing 50 years, and that's what I've been doing in order to keep in that groove there.

Louis Armstrong

#63. The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment!

Louise L. Hay

#64. We have little control over the circumstances of life. We can't control the weather or the economy, and we can't control what other people say about or do to us. There is only one area where we have control
we can rule the kingdom inside. The heart of every problem is the problem in the heart.

Warren W. Wiersbe

#65. Damn. I never should have agreed to this. What is he thinking? Here we are in a piece of crap pickup truck on our way to sit outside of a supermarket to kidnap this girl. Damn. He'd better not be falling for her. Sure she's cute, but I can't think about that.

Jenna-Lynne Duncan

#66. And you can't do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That's why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are.

Larry Kramer

#67. Often times we feel like either we can't make a world of difference, or we feel that it's not going to change anything anyway. The truth is you can change someone's day, you can change someone's life, but you have to show up and do what you got to do to actually see any fruit coming from it.

Nick Vujicic

#68. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Alan Rickman

#69. Given the choice, children who don't want for anything will not save ... We have an obligation as parents to give our children what they need. What they want we can give them as a special gift, or they can save their money for it.

Barbara Coloroso

#70. What makes humans valuable in the first place? Science can't answer that question because science deals only with things we can measure empirically though the senses. If you want an answer, you'll have to do metaphysics.

Scott Klusendorf

#71. We are so proud of 'Unconditional'. I couldn't have been more honest in these songs, and I can't wait to see the impact they have. This record is exactly what it's supposed to be.

Matty Mullins

#72. We have too many politicians who are poll-driven to excess. Polls are important. You've got to know what the public is thinking, but you can't let them drive you completely.

Rudy Giuliani

#73. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

Gordon Brown

#74. If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works

Barack Obama

#75. The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. If it is trained well, it can create enormous wealth in what seems to be an instant.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#76. Because, well, you're not immortal anymore. At least as far as we know; just because you can bleed doesn't mean you'll grow old and die. Maybe you won't."
"How can we know?"
"There's only one way to find out."
"What?"
He smiles. "You'll just have to live.

Jessica Khoury

#77. The point is that we have no control. The point is that there are no guarantees, that we never know what's going to happen in life, but we can't give up. The point is that, fallible as we all are, we have to keep trying, we have to keep reaching out to others.

Joy Fielding

#78. You can't change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn't make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. We don't get those choices. The story is what got you here, and embracing its truth is what makes the outcome bearable.

Gail Caldwell

#79. People always complain that they can't do this and they can't do that."
"If we look at our lives and concentrate on things that we don't have or wish to have, that doesn't change the circumstances. The truth is that we have to focus on what we have and make the best out of it.

Nick Vujicic

#80. We have to keep trusting God. We can't just trust God when he's doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.

Akhil Sharma

#81. What have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.

T. S. Eliot

#82. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Phil Jones

#83. You can't map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know that There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

Terry Pratchett

#84. One can't deny what has happened to us in the past. The secret is to enjoy and be proud of the music we've created and the people with whom we have been linked. It's all a long chain of involvement in the world, and we are proud to be yet another link in this chain.

Graham Nash

#85. I think again we're way out of balance. We've got to rein in what has become almost an article of faith that almost anybody can have a gun anywhere at any time. And I don't believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.

Hillary Clinton

#86. I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

Steven Pinker

#87. I'm praying for 'Ice Age' 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Because I really think we can run those characters into the '60s, and I'm talking the 1960s, you know? The Civil Rights Movement. That's what I'm praying for, because then I wouldn't have to do anything else.

Denis Leary

#88. Miss Maudie settled her bridgework. "You know old Mr. Radley was a foot-washing Baptist - " "That's what you are, ain't it?" "My shell's not that hard, child. I'm just a Baptist." "Don't you all believe in foot-washing?" "We do. At home in the bathtub." "But we can't have communion with you all -

Harper Lee

#89. Unless there is free and fair competition, there can't be healthy economic development. And what we have in Burma now is not an open-market economy that allows free and fair competition, but a form of colonialism makes a few people very, very wealthy. It's what you would crony capitalism.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#90. We looked after her. But she wanted something else, something more, I don't know what. She didn't even want the kitten, although I would have fed it too. That was the limit. Why did she never stop whining? If someone can't be helped, then they don't want help.

Magda Szabo

#91. My theory on life is that life is beautiful. Life doesn't change. You have a day, and a night, and a month, and a year. We people change - we can be miserable or we can be happy. It's what you make of your life.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

#92. What sucks the worst is ... this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.

Dean Koontz

#93. The process of testing claims is called science. Now, If you have a claim that can't be tested thats what we call pseudo-science. The difference between pseudo-science and science is whether or not you can test it.

Bill Nye

#94. Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.

Charles M. Schulz

#95. We can ask for information and use words to forge a closer connection, but we don't have to take people around the block with our conversations. We don't have to listen to, or participate in, nonsense. We can say what we want and stop when we're done.

Melody Beattie

#96. Most of us don't think about miracles that we could possibly do. We don't have a vocabulary of how God works with the specific things that He does, and we don't know how to align ourselves with what He is doing so that we can be His vehicle on the earth to deliver a miracle.

Bruce Wilkinson

#97. Namely the manager will assess what he believes a player is worth and he will discuss that with the board and then we will go after that target. If we can achieve it at that target, great, but if we can't we will have to move on to the next player.

David Gill

#98. I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for.

Rush Limbaugh

#99. Critical thinking is one of our highest achievements besides eating with a fork, so when we emotionally can't get what we want, we have to think our way towards the resolution and this is where we crash and burn.

Ruby Wax

#100. Why can't we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles - and functional?

Prince Charles