Top 100 Would Have Quotes

#1. When we can overcome our own personal battles, we can live confidently in situations we would have otherwise been too weak to handle.

Tanya R. Liverman

#2. I'm beginning to think a dictionary would have been a far more advantageous birthday gift for you."
"More advantageous than being eaten alive by a giant, carnivorous bunny? Yes, most things fall in that category, I think.

William Ritter

#3. Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything. Once you say the character is in love, he can do the craziest thing that nobody would do who's not in love. Once you're in love, you have that excuse to go and do whatever you want.

Josh Hutcherson

#4. My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.

Jill Bolte Taylor

#5. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Dale Peck

#6. You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn't have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic.

Junot Diaz

#7. To say it was a dark and stormy night would be a gross understatement. It was colder than witch's kiss, wetter than a spring swamp, and blacker than a tax collector's heart. A sane man would have been curled up in front of a fire with a cup of mulled wine and a good boo-, ah, a willing wench.

Hilari Bell

#8. Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?

Amos Bronson Alcott

#9. A lot of people would have loved me to keep singing ... You come to a point where you have sung, more or less ... your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living.

Cat Stevens

#10. Can you get it? (Jaden) If I swear myself to eternal slavery to Artemis. Yes. (Acheron) I'd rather trade places with Prometheus and have my innards ripped out every day. (Jaden) So would I. (Acheron)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#11. Ireland and England are like two sisters; I would have them embrace like one brother.

Boyle Roche

#12. Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.

Samuel Beckett

#13. Most cases, I would say, in a huge amount of cases, countries that have worked with us and have used our financial facilities have come out quick ... more quickly and in a better shape from a crisis than would have come out otherwise.

Rodrigo Rato

#14. What do you have in this car?" he asked.
"What do you mean, like weapons?"
"That would be a good start."
"Well, I 've got a mini Swiss Army Knife on my key chain."
"A two-inch stainless steel blade and a nail file. They might as well surrender to us now ...

Richard Castle

#15. I wanted to go home to the safety of my bed and to my stuffed animals and to my people I'd known my whole life. I had nothing to say to anybody, and fervently prayed that no one there would have anything to say to me.

Rachel Cohn

#16. A friend of mine who works for naval intelligence said an aerial satellite revealed that 1.9 million attended the event in 1995. But if they would have had a rumble at the march the newspapers would have said that 75 million Afro-Americans were there.

Dick Gregory

#17. Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Winston Churchill

#18. Without the blessing of cowardice, the world would long since have been torn to bits.

Mason Cooley

#19. Then you go ahead and cry, " Will said.

That ended my weeping. Had he asked me not to cry, I would not have been able to stop, but his permission somehow quit my tears.

Kathleen Grissom

#20. One might have thought the world would stop ascribing moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of punishing terrorism. It has not happened that way.

Theodore Bikel

#21. I thought I would have a heart attack just looking at you.

Brenda Hodnett

#22. True, we might never have arrived, but the fact is we did. If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worth worrying about so much.

Mikhail Lermontov

#23. If he had uttered the word "come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the finality of despair.

Ford Madox Ford

#24. The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.

Ellen DeGeneres

#25. If all men saw the fair and wise the same men would not have debaters' double strife.

Euripides

#26. Where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.

Ernest Hemingway,

#27. If you said to people you can cast a secret ballot on whether to turn back the clock and have Morsi in power again, I don't think very many people in Washington would turn back that clock.

Elliott Abrams

#28. I was very compelled by a woman who would choose this profession. She [Maura Isles] came from a very highly-educated, wealthy background and could have chosen to do a lot of other things, and has this uber-feminine, modern woman mentality, but works this job.

Sasha Alexander

#29. And if he is lying and he double-crosses you, I'll kill him for you. From anyone else, it would have been an idle threat, and I smiled, feeling loved. (Ivy and Rachel)

Kim Harrison

#30. I've always known from the time I was eight years old what I wanted to do. I would have been fairly content to be someone's lead guitar player.

Brad Paisley

#31. Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years.

Nicholas Sparks

#32. The last time anyone did anything wrong in this town, Hades's men found those responsible and dragged them back here in chains. You would have to be insane to actively want to piss that man off." "Insane or very sure of yourself," I said.

Steve McHugh

#33. In almost every photograph I have ever made, there is something I would do to complete it. I take that to be the spirit hole or the deliberate mistake that's in a Navajo rug to not be godlike, but to be human.

Sam Abell

#34. It's amazing how books change. The chapter you're working on today would not have been the same if you wrote it yesterday or tomorrow.

Raymond Bolton

#35. I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened ... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.

Alice Sebold

#36. If time stood still for a moment, what would you be grateful for? And will it be enough to allow time to have meaning when it begins?

Steven Cuoco

#37. Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#38. If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.

Arlen Specter

#39. He took her hand in his and kissed her fingers, then shook his head. "I wouldn't have let you get away. I was angry and I acted foolishly, but I would have gotten you back. Whatever it took, I would have gotten you back. You're my answer, Zoe. You're my salvation.

Elliot Mabeuse

#40. I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

Edward VIII

#41. An I must drink sour ale, I must, but never have I yielded to a man before, and that without would or mark upon my body. Nor, when I bethink me, will I yield now.

Howard Pyle

#42. Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.

Sting

#43. I would have no desire other than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray; pray thyself in me.

Francois Fenelon

#44. I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.

Daniel Goldstein

#45. Respect yourself is you would have others respect you.

Baltasar Gracian

#46. I would prefer to have gum on my face than own up to the fact that I accidentally got gum on my face. And of course one sentence out of every ten that comes from my mouth is probably not one hundred percent true.

Alicia Thompson

#47. We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.

Rae Meadows

#48. Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Octavio Paz

#49. I am for the muscles. I would like to have a lot of muscles, because women like it. I'm for bodybuilding, but it's very exhausting.

Michel Houellebecq

#50. Because those four days in the mountains, they changed us. I gave you a piece of me. And you must have given me a piece of yourself, too, because you wouldn't have come here otherwise. You would have let go. I can't let go of you, Britt. And I don't want you to let go of me.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#51. She was wearing a gown of lilac pink threaded with silver and stitched with tiny pearls. It was gorgeous in itself, and of course had the perfect new skirt, but it did not flatter her as a cooler shade would have done.

Anne Perry

#52. My main goal, starting out as a young actor, was to carry the reins that Pac left off and to reach the depths as an actor that I know he would have reached had he still been here with us.

Michael K. Williams

#53. At school, I always wanted to belong to a gang, and no one would have me. So I'd have make my own gang, but with everybody else's leftovers.

Kristin Scott Thomas

#54. Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

Arthur C. Clarke

#55. When I was very young in London, I had a bank account, which didn't have a great deal in it. I should think at least every three months the bank manager would call me up and threaten to strangle me because I had no money, and I was writing checks.

Peter Mayle

#56. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no personal computers.

Jimmy Maher

#57. She'd betrayed her country because she'd believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?
He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.
But she wanted to.

Marie Rutkoski

#58. Since I first picked up the violin, I've been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.

Andrew Bird

#59. The most intoxicating thing about being an actor is to surrender to a story that you never would have come up with.

Brit Marling

#60. That save from Pele's header was the best I ever made. I didn't have any idea how famous it would become - to start with, I didn't even realise I'd made it at all.

Gordon Banks

#61. Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words 'to father' have such a different meaning from the words 'to mother'.

Claire Fuller

#62. Without music I would never, ever have travelled anywhere.

Richard Hawley

#63. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

H.P. Lovecraft

#64. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

Graham Greene

#65. Don't be 'practical' in politics. To be practical in that sense means that you have schooled yourself to think along the lines, and in the grooves that those who rob you would desire you to think.

James Connolly

#66. It had been too long since she'd had some hot sex. She wasn't looking for a relationship. No, a one night stand was what she wanted. Anonymous sex with a handsome cowboy that she would never have to see again.

Tamara Hoffa

#67. I would have Simon Cowell sing 'Shiny Happy People' by R.E.M. just to show his true personality.

Sanjaya Malakar

#68. Well, everybody knew their character. I was the only one who didn't have a partner. I basically showed up when people got in trouble. Where I came from, I don't know. Nobody knows. But I would show up to help.

Bubba Smith

#69. Before me no one would have dared dress in black

Coco Chanel

#70. I would love to have a varied career, like Hugh Jackman. He started in musical theater, then established himself in film, but he still does a lot of stage work. And he does it all beautifully.

Samantha Barks

#71. If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.

Alan Sillitoe

#72. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.

Simon Sinek

#73. Why would people have confidence in a female director when there are so few?

Jennifer Lawrence

#74. He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.

Rachel Hartman

#75. If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

Andy Borowitz

#76. My father never did any of the things that my friends' fathers did with them. We never tossed a football around or even watched games together. He would always say, "I don't have time - maybe later," but he always had time to sit around and get drunk.

Susan Forward

#77. His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?"
But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

Lois Lowry

#78. I've been very fortunate in my art career. It's something I would never have expected.

Marcel Dzama

#79. If we can't have the courage to tell our constituents, hey, we've got to cut back, then if we can point to something and say, I would like to vote for more benefits for you, but this balanced budget amendment or statutory spending cap or whatever the device is, is preventing me from doing it.

Jeff Flake

#80. As they lay entwined together afterwards, they both were sure their future was blessed, and it would never have occurred to them that Henry and Eleanor had once believed that, too.

Sharon Kay Penman

#81. I think the sensitivity that you need to create certain things sometimes would spill over into things that shouldn't have bothered me.

Jack White

#82. And under my breath I was telling it to hisht and for shame, and if I had known any swearing I would have had that in, too.

Richard Llewellyn

#83. If I had a long-term partner, I don't think I'd be an actor. It'd be too much of a strain; you have to work too hard to balance that life with a family and a mortgage and all that stuff - it would be too much.

Rory McCann

#84. But I would have vengeance to fall on the head, not on the hand; on the tyrannical and oppressive government which designed and directed these premeditated and reiterated insults, not on the tools of office which they employed in the execution of the injuries they designed you.

Walter Scott

#85. We fixate on sins of commission: Don't do this, don't do that - and you're OK. But that is holiness by subtraction. And it's more hypocrisy than holiness! It's the sins of omission - what you would have, could have, and should have done - that break the heart of your heavenly Father.

Mark Batterson

#86. Chrisfield looked straight ahead of him. He did not feel lonely any more now that he was marching in ranks again. His feet beat the ground in time with the other feet. He would not have to think whether to go to the right or to the left. He would do as the others did.

John Dos Passos

#87. To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other possibility.

Fred Alan Wolf

#88. I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.

John Hodgman

#89. That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States. NEW

Isabel Wilkerson

#90. Hats have been my thing pretty much my whole life but finance has not. I would go to the corner store and buy really cheap baseball style caps and wear those to school.

Ne-Yo

#91. I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive.

Diane Cilento

#92. I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#93. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?

Thomas Merton

#94. In any case, I hadn't gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

Alexei Panshin

#95. There is something more here than embarrassment at being praised. The strengths 'I' have are not admissible to the arena of ability where they are socially useful; for once admitted, 'I'
my real self
would no longer have them.

Richard Sennett

#96. I can'tdo it again,Nick. I can't. And I would rather give my life for you than have you give yours for me.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#97. Anther spasm ripped through me and all I could wonder was why in the world had women been doing this for thousands of years? This was barbaric. This was torture. Never again. Never again as long as I lived would I have another baby, so Beep had better be pretty awesome.

Darynda Jones

#98. In all my years on earth, I have seen time and time again that those who are the happiest are those who have the courage to follow their hearts - to believe what otherwise would be unbelievable; to seek the light; to find the truth.

Michael McLean

#99. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#100. I am marrying the finest man I have ever known." "It will cost you dear," he warns. "It would be worse to lose him.

Philippa Gregory

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