Might Have Been Quotes - Page 15

• I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

  Gail Godwin

  Thinking, Shadow, Might

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• It is the large aggregate of small things perpetually occurring that robs me of all my time. The expense of learning to read might have been spared in my education, for I never read.

  Hannah More

  Time, Might, Expenses

  Hannah More (1860). “Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macaulay, containing notices of Lord Macaulay's youth: Edited and arranged by Arthur Roberts”, p.197

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• I think it's easier to play when you do have a balanced home. I think if I did have alcoholism in my personal life, or my mother, or somebody close to me, it might have been much more uncomfortable to get in there.

  Angelina Jolie

  Mother, Home, Thinking

  "Angelina Jolie Gets Conservative in The Good Shepherd". Interview with Julian Roman, movieweb.com. December 18, 2006.

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• How many serious family quarrels, marriages out of spite, and alterations of wills, might have been prevented by a gentle dose of blue pill!-What awful instances of chronic dyspepsia in the characters of Hamlet and Othello! Banish dyspepsia and spirituous liquors from society, and you have no crime, or at least so little that you would not consider it worth mentioning.

  Charles Kingsley

  Character, Blue, Pills

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• Those who have to face persistent political persecution become highly politicized. Our lives take on a rhythm different from those who, on waking up in the morning, do not need to wonder who might have been arrested during the night and what further acts of blatant injustice might be committed against our people later during the day. Our antennae become highly sensitive to vibrations barely noticed by those whose everyday existence is removed from political struggle.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Morning, Struggle, Night

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• Feeble are we? Yes, without God we are nothing. But what, by faith, every man may be, God requires him to be. This is the only Christian idea of duty. Measure obligation by inherent ability! No, my brethren, Christian obligation has a very different measure. It is measured by the power that God will give us, measured by the gifts and possible increments of faith. And what a reckoning will it be for many of us, when Christ summons us to answer before Him under the law, not for what we are, but for what we might have been.

  Horace Bushnell

  Christian, Men, Law

  Horace Bushnell (1876). “Sermons for the New Life”

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• Style consists in maintaining a convincing reality all through a piece. It's like wearing a garment that looks as if it might have been made for you even if it wasn't.

  Arlene Croce

  Reality, Style, Looks

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• Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, let them complain over what might have been, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, let them be discouraged, let them be revengeful and vindictive, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, let them become materialistic and empty, but not you. Let others become ungrateful and stop praying, but not you! Let others give up, but not you! For you know in whom you believe and you know that He is always able. Now, that's you!

  Jim Rohn

  Motivational, Hurt, Giving Up

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• When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy-I was in the presence of the inimitable. Uncanny Valley extends that experience-almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward.

  Mary Ruefle

  Book, Fall, Giving

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• I have never been much of a groomer. I take baths a lot, but I don't wear deodorant. I don't have to. I have a miraculous body scent. I've had women smell me and say that should be bottled. I would advise guys to lay off the Drakkar, because the cavemen weren't wearing it. They might have been putting mint leaves on their balls, but your scent is grown naturally. I have really good dating advice.

  Zach Galifianakis

  Smell, Dating, Guy

  "Zach Galifianakis: Soon You Will Be Laughing at This Man". Interview with Peter Martin, www.esquire.com. June 2, 2009.

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• Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? Worried, we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey.

  Bruno Schulz

  Running, Journey, Events

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to its shimmering red presence in the clear night sky. It is like a glowing ember in a field of ethereal lights, projecting energy and promise. It inspires visions of an approachable world. The mind vaults to thoughts of what might have been (if Mars were a litter closer to the warming Sun) and of what could be (if humans were one day to plant colonies there).

  John Noble Wilford

  Eye, Night, Light

  John Noble Wilford (1991). “Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space”, Vintage

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• What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

  George Eliot

  Despair, Trying, Sap

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot's Life, Complete: Top Novelist Focus”, p.407, 谷月社

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• A woman's counsel brought us first to woe,
  And made her man his paradise forego,
  Where at heart's ease he liv'd; and might have been
  As free from sorrow as he was from sin.

  John Dryden

  Women, Heart, Sorrow

  John Dryden, C. B., Esquire Charles BATHURST (1852). “Selections from the poetry of Dryden, including his plays and translations. [The editor's preface signed: C. B., i.e. Charles Bathurst.]”, p.243

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• I wasn't Barbie-obsessed. I think my mother might have been my Barbie.

  Michael Kors

  Mother, Thinking, Barbie

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• In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

  Chinua Achebe

  Vocabulary, Disease, Opponents

  Chinua Achebe (1988). “Anthills of the Savannah”, p.100, Heinemann

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• It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

  Joan Didion

  Spring, America, People

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Mar 21, 2015

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• Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world-or the last.

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Men, Gone Away, Silence

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• An emotion that lives with me is a sense of what might have been had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.

  Michael Owen

  Might, Weapons, Emotion

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• Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

  Anatole Broyard

  Government, Aristocracy, Might

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• I was always a neat kid. I never wanted my hands dirty. I wasn't a dirty kid. A lot of kids like to run around. If I was rolling around the dirt, I went home and took a shower. That's just the way I was. I'm not sure. I might have been born with it.

  Mark Teixeira

  Running, Dirty, Home

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• Otherwise I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

  Jane Kenyon

  Dog, Sweet, Strong

  Jane Kenyon (1996). “Otherwise: new and selected poems”, Graywolf Pr

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• If we could have somehow stayed away from the public and the press, it might have been different, but every private issue seemed to be played out on the front page.

  Marla Maples

  Issues, Different, Might

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two of these might have been highly favored.

  Stanley B. Prusiner

  Two, Might, Steps

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• If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.

  Charles Dickens

  Love, Ears, May

  Jan Fields, Charles Dickens (2010). “David Copperfield”, p.953, Calico Chapter Books

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