Might Have Been Quotes - Page 10

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

Joseph Conrad

Work, Mean, Reflection

Joseph Conrad (2015). “Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad (Including His Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays: Unforgettable Tales like Heart of Darkness, Point of Honor, Falk, Secret Sharer, The Return & Freya of Seven Isles”, p.734, e-artnow

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This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.

Albert Claude

Cells, Technique, Brutality

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Although I wasnt able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

Tony Hillerman

House, Vietnam, Might

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At heart, Sussman was a theoretician. In another age, he might have been a Talmudic scholar. He had cultivated a Socratic method, zinging question after question at the reporters: Who moved over from Commerce to CRP with Stans? What about Mitchell's secretary? Why won't anybody say when Liddy went to the White House or who worked with him there? Mitchell and Stans both ran the budget committee, right? What does that tell you? Then Sussman would puff on his pipe, a satisfied grin on his face.

Carl Bernstein

Heart, White, House

Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward (1999). “All the President's Men”, p.51, Simon and Schuster

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Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Steven Bochco

Memories, Firsts, Television

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Imagine a master painting that's never finished...when you can only build on previous work, you become limited by what you can paint...If you are in the midst of painting a forest full of tall tress and hanging vines, it is rather difficult to wake up the next day and suddenly turn that paining into the beach and ocean...We have to treat each day like a black canvas on which we can paint. Yesterday might have been paining flowers, but today you can paint cars or horses. A new day represents a chance for renewal.

Ian K. Smith

Beach, Horse, Ocean

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I might have been able to make it as a pitcher except for one thing: I had a rather awkward motion and every time I brought my left arm forward I hit myself in the ear.

Casey Stengel

Awkward, Ears, Arms

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Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

Stephen Potter

Book, Should Have, Might

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No one's interested really in knowing what policies or diplomatic initiatives or arms negotiations might have been compromised by me.

Aldrich Ames

Knowing, Arms, Might

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Governments having failed the people, the people are entirely justified in assuming for themselves an essential role in government. Where a government takes proper measures to protect the people under its care, such a proceeding might have been thought both unnecessary and unjustifiable: But here it is quite the Reverse.

Benjamin Franklin

Government, People, Liberty

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Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.

Edmund Gosse

Thinking, Errors, Parent

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At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.

Sarah Hall

Heart, Past, Night

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Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos.

Martin Rees

Moon, Civilization, Space

"Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning". Book by Martin Rees, 2003.

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Had it been published by a voice from heaven, that twelve poor men, taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross, it might have been thought an illusion against all reason of men; yet we know it was undertaken and accomplished by them.

Stephen Charnock

Taken, Men, Voice

Stephen Charnock (2013). “The Existence and Attributes of God”, p.678, Ravenio Books

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Ya know, Hitler was this evil, evil man. But with the World Bank and Israel manipulating America, he might have been on to something.

Zach Braff

Men, Israel, America

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This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Titles, Would Be

Girl, Interrupted (1993)

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How different South Africa’s cricketing achievements, and indeed the future of the country itself, might have been if racism had not denied Frank Roro the opportunity of batting with Bruce Mitchell in the Lord’s sunshine.

Richard Lloyd

Country, Sunshine, Opportunity

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Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.

Ogden Nash

Long, Progress, Gone

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However, don't let these statistics mislead you, gang violence is not limited to California and or big urban areas - that might have been true a while ago but it is no longer the case today.

Bob Filner

California, Statistics, Might

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The key to the match might have been his serving. Maybe I should have concentrated harder on watching them go by me, I don't know.

Andy Roddick

Should Have, Keys, Tennis

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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

Regret, Risk, Path

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Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

Virginia Woolf

Dream, Night, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.214, Virginia Woolf

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I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted - if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.

Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

Life, Might, Steps

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In all troublous events we may find comfort, though it be only in the negative admission that things might have been worse.

Amelia Barr

Gratitude, Comfort, Events

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The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.

Donald Harington

Writing, New Orleans, Justice

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