What It Could Have Been Quotes

#1. Whether it goes to series or stands by itself, I'm proud of what we did with it, not only from the standpoint of what it could have been, but for itself.

Yancy Butler

#2. I can't explain something I saw on holiday on Holy Island when I was about nine years old, but do you know what, it could have been my PE teacher dressed in a monk's habit. I have no idea. I'm not a ghost person ... it doesn't mean there aren't unexplained things; I just don't think they're ghosts.

Tom Goodman-Hill

#3. I'm not sure what the future holds but I do know that I'm going to be positive and not wake up feeling desperate. As my dad said 'Nic, it is what it is, it's not what it should have been, not what it could have been, it is what it is.'

Nicole Kidman

#4. Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

Dean Wesley Smith

#5. You can learn a lot about a person by where they are from and where they have chosen to be."

"You'll never know what could have been if it never was.

Sarah Sloat

#6. I'm not good, Mac. Never have been.'
What-true confession time? my eyes tease. Don't need it.
'I want what I want and I take it.'
Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?
'There's nothing I can't live with. Only things I won't live without.

Karen Marie Moning

#7. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

Robert James Waller

#8. 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

#9. The Stones were always exemplary of one of the best of all rock qualities: tightness. They have always been economical, the opposite of ornamental. Having a very clear idea of what they wanted to say they could go into a studio and make it all up on a three minute cut.

Jon Landau

#10. I can't even think about what life "could
have been" like in Boston, without crying. It's like deja-vu, I don't think me
and Boston were ever meant to be.

Cecelia Ahern

#11. Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)

Andre Dubus III

#12. It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It's what depression does to a person, it changes them completely.

Melina Marchetta

#13. asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not - I'd read it first. I don't think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn't known what was going to happen. I'd have been way too worried.

Will Schwalbe

#14. After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Joyce Carol Oates

#15. My heart is empty.
But my brain -
my brain is full.
It races with thoughts
of what could have been.

Samantha Schutz

#16. If you give your life to a cause in which you believe, and if it is right and just, and if your life comes to an end as a result of this, then your life could not have been spent in a more redemptive way. I think that is what my husband has done.

Coretta Scott King

#17. I have always done the best I could, and yet, somehow, it has never been enough. No one cared what I did. They always turned their backs on me.

Marie Lu

#18. Travis considered the larger one below it. A file drawer. Was it even worth bothering with? What could have been in it but paper? What could be in it now but an inch-deep layer of mold dust?

He opened it.

It contained an inch-deep layer of mold dust.

Patrick Lee

#19. 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

#20. What I learned, in the two months that we shot, I don't think I could have learned in two to four years of drama school. It's invaluable to me, and that's been the most fun. It's been nice to let this be a learning experience in everything.

Steven Yeun

#21. Experience is the only teacher," Hey-Soos says. "Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don't listen to their parents, or people don't leave churches and do what the preacher tells them?

Chris Crutcher

#22. If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.

Daniel Clowes

#23. When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

Cormac McCarthy

#24. I made mistakes. I trusted both too little and too much. But, by the gods, I tried so hard. I gave everything I had.
I have always done the best I could, and yet, somehow,it has never been enough. No one cared what I did. They always turned their backs on me. Why can't I be like that?

Marie Lu

#25. Don't think about it. Don't think about what could have been. It's too unbearable.

Sophie Kinsella

#26. I've been working at performing for five years now. I've been working in Australia and Spain and England. When I was only 15 or 16, 1 was performing in bars; I could have had legal problems, but it's also the only way to get to know what music is all about.

Andy Gibb

#27. My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that's what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me.

Stephen Richards

#28. The warmth of the bourbon still glowed deep within her, helping her find her center. How could something so simple have brought her so much relief? But Safia sensed it wasn't truly the alcohol so much as the kindness. She had forgotten what that was like. It had been too long. Not since ... not

James Rollins

#29. First of all, God inspires me, where he's brought me, it blows my mind. To know that He brought me this far, it could not have been an accident, to go forward, I'm excited to leap into the void, I'm excited about tomorrow, the unknown, excited to see what else He has for me.

Columbus Short

#30. You know what the true definition of hell is? It's when you die, you get to meet the person you could have been.

Frank Mir

#31. A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

Donald Norman

#32. I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared [to register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

Fannie Lou Hamer

#33. The religion of the God who became man has met the religion (for such it is) of man who makes himself God. And what happened? Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There could have been, but there was none

Pope Paul VI

#34. If I'd ever seen what love really could do, or was, maybe I'd have believed in it from the start. But too much of my life had been spent watching marriages come together and then fall apart. So I understood, yes. But sometimes, like lately, I wished that I didn't, not at all.

Sarah Dessen

#35. 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

#36. It's been constant grinding and trying to secure work that I care about, tireless auditions and meetings. I've been fortunate that a lot of cool doors have opened to me, chiefly meeting great people who were inspired by what I've done and what they feel I could bring to their projects.

Keith Stanfield

#37. It was no good to look back, to apologize for what had happened, or to wonder what could have been different.

Lily Blake

#38. Our lives are entwined and we're bound together by everything that we've been through, what we feel and the love I have for you. I know you love me too Layla and I wish I could make it all right again but I can't.

Marie Coulson

#39. What the mud had been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam.

Charles Dickens

#40. 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

#41. Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.

Paul Bowles

#42. We have a chance to wind down and expedite the removal of 96 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. What an achievement it would be, if at the end of the next administration, we could say that the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the United States had been reduced to the barest minimums.

Dianne Feinstein

#43. The young Steve Jobs had a hard time articulating something that didn't exist. He could see it, taste it, knew what it felt like, but he didn't have all the language because it hadn't been invented yet. People didn't fathom the personal computer on a mass produced level.

Joshua Michael Stern

#44. I am never happy with what I do, so I try not to watch stuff that is filmed with me in it because I am always like, 'Oh, I could have done that a little bit better,' or, 'I could have done that differently - that riff could have been a little better.'

Josh Young

#45. 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

#46. Camille leaned forward. When she did, the neckline of her black silk blouse gaped open. If Simon had still been human, he would have blushed. "Will you let me see it?"
Simon could actually feel his eyes pop out. "See what?

Cassandra Clare

#47. 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

#48. I supposed, perhaps, you miss the promise of what could have been, while at the same time you are grateful that what it was instead is over.

Sylvia Day

#49. Tasting what could have been - what should have been - didn't make it easier.

Kele Moon

#50. Forgive yourself first. Release the need to replay a negative situation over and over again in your mind. Don't become a hostage to your past by always reviewing and reliving your mistakes. Don't remind yourself of what should have, could have or would have been. Release it and let it go. Move on.

Les Brown

#51. It dishonors the death of our loved ones to shut out happiness. We throw away what could have been and waste our opportunities. We each have a purpose, a destiny and to realize it we must reach beyond what we are capable of.

Colleen Houck

#52. Started out, Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho ... What is zaftig? Isn't that German for big fat pig? I guess I was lucky- zaftig is kind of a nice word. It could have been, Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho.

Margaret Cho

#53. It was terrible if you looked at things the way they could have been, but if you concentrated on what there was, it didn't look too bad.

Elizabeth Cadell

#54. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works - although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn't see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.

Wendell Berry

#55. There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.

Jeremy Northam

#56. I've been very lucky, man. Like you say, though, the writing is what kicked all that in and made it possible. It's something that I have always been very thankful of, that that kicked in, and that I could be free with the music.

Tony Joe White

#57. I was very lucky with the parents I was blessed with. I don't think it could have worked out any better. They've always been so understanding of me and understanding of what I want to do.

Emma Stone

#58. I have always been guided by striving to show the best that I could. That is what kept me going in tennis and it is the same now.

Steffi Graf

#59. I've never been the kind of man who believed in dreams, Kat. That wasn't the hand I got dealt. So I sure as hell never spent any time chasing them." He swallowed hard and nodded. "But meeting you . . . if I could've dreamed, if I'd have even known what to dream of, it would've been of you.

Laura Kaye

#60. The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. 'Beautiful,' she sighed, though in truth it could have been a Polaroid of the inside of his pocket.

David Nicholls

#61. -I didn't mean to hurt you.
-You shouldnae have been able to.
She blinked at that, but knew what he meant.
-I suppose not, no. we're still strangers. More or less.
-Only in the measure of time could we consider ourselved that.

(Graham & Katie)
Some Like It Scot

Donna Kauffman

#62. You have always been what I want. I just made mistakes along the way. I told you that I would make it up to you, that I would show you what I could be for you, if you would only let me.

K.A. Linde

#63. I don't care what your Oort woman wants you to steal for her," she says. "You already did your worst. You stole what could have been. From me and from yourself. And you can never have it back.

Hannu Rajaniemi

#64. Damn it, Cora, we could have been exposed! You can't take joyrides like that. What if someone saw you?" Nessa lectured.
"And you, Noah; stop it with the dirty thoughts. She just lost her boyfriend so don't even think about it. Do we understand each other?

Andrea Heltsley

#65. Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

Bill Gates

#66. But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.

Jamaica Kincaid

#67. What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest - whether it be chess, bridge, or stock selection - than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?

Warren Buffett

#68. And what do I smell like?"
"Like arrogance and self-adoration," she snapped. "I can smell it a mile off.Why bother saying you didn't help me when it could only have been you?

Frankie Rose

#69. This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.
At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

Mal Peet

#70. That was the moment you should have told her what your heart was telling you. If you had allowed it, she could have been your whole world. All you had to do was open the door. All you had to say was, come in.

Lang Leav

#71. Do you realize you could have been killed? (Hunter)
No, that was just a practice run. I'm thinking about trying it again because it was so. Much. Fun! What the hell do you think? (Abbie)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#72. What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.

Raymond Chandler

#73. All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

George Lucas

#74. Kane narrowed his eyes. 'Where have you been all this time, Caitlin?' She could see the suspicion in his eyes, the accusation.

'Tied to a radiator.'

'What is it about you that makes people want to cuff you, huh?

Lindsay J. Pryor

#75. It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.

Alan Paton

#76. For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

Jodi Picoult

#77. I was not the commander, I was a junior person, so once both were outside, I followed my leader, because we (NASA) had not put together detailed jobs of people outside. I believe it could have been improved. But it was very successful for what it was.

Buzz Aldrin

#78. I wish people could have seen what they called our mansion. They would have been so disappointed, because it was just an old house that we fixed up, and I love the old house.

Tammy Faye Bakker

#79. I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

Toni Morrison

#80. He's only been here six weeks. Nobody else has a clue what we did, and it happened seventeen years ago. There's no way he could have found out in six weeks. No way. He must be talking about something else.

Liliana Hart

#81. If it weren't for my breast cancer, I wouldn't be a 'Today' host. After I got better, I talked to my boss about working on the show. Six months before, I'd have been terrified to go in there and ask for what I wanted. But after what I'd been through, how could I be scared of being told no?

Hoda Kotb

#82. Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one" like me remembering the way it could have been. Help me with this barricade. No surrender. No defeat. A spectre's haunting Albert Street. I am your pamphleteer.

John K. Samson

#83. But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

Deb Caletti

#84. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.

Adolf Hitler

#85. It was too late to think about what could have been or what should have been. What's done is done. The past was in the past and there was no changing it.

Jason Medina

#86. When you're having sex again, it makes you wonder why you weren't before. What could possibly have been bad enough to make you stop doing THAT?

Matthew Norman

#87. We treat what's lost, what could have never been, what we could have never dreamed of, again. We treat it like heirlooms for it is so precious. For we know it can be lost, again.

Kevin Focke

#88. By morning, she was raw and sore, and knew walking would be an effort. By morning, she could barely remember what it had been like to not know his body, not to have felt him inside her and held him in her arms and absorbed the power of his thrusts as he came.
By morning, she was his.

Linda Howard

#89. Certainly, I know what it's like to be obsessed. I haven't always been there for my children. They could reach me, but I wasn't always there. But, you know, that's not necessarily anything to do with being a writer. I mean, a taxi driver could have the same problem ... Maybe.

Henning Mankell

#90. Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

Christopher Barzak

#91. The happiness she found in Rhys' arms was dimmed by the fact that she was going to lose him.
He shattered the walls caging her in, giving her a glimpse of what her life could have been.
And she was going to destroy it all.

Donna Grant

#92. 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

#93. Pining for what could have been only holds people back from living their lives now. Life is full of surprises, and it doesn't help us to fixate on regrets or try to recover what has been lost.

Jeff Goins

#94. Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn't to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there.

Jo Walton

#95. I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse borne away with every breath! Misplaced upon the throne misplaced in life. I know not what I could have been, but feel I am not what I should be let it end.

Lord Byron

#96. I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It's really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you'll find there's not a lot of competition;

Nevil Shute

#97. What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing
a very hard thing ... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?

Robin McKinley

#98. The Kindly Ones would say it didn't matter. And maybe they were right. We still could have snatched happiness from our tragedy if we had made the right choices, the right wishes. If we had been kinder, braver, purer. If only we had been anything but what we were.

Rosamund Hodge

#99. If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrified to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#100. When you read the poem, you wonder, what might Grendel have been? Could it have been a person that was turned away? Someone that was disfigured or deformed? Like everything else did, it came from somewhere. It's really exciting, and not knowing is part of the magic and mystery.

Kieran Bew