Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.
An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed, he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted.
I feel like I'm part of a generation of people who are stuck in the past and are really self-absorbed. I mean, we're actually taking pictures of ourselves and posting them on Facebook, and keeping in touch with people that should have been out of our lives 15 years ago.
I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.
When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band - or at least in a Pixies cover band.
I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!
Job-wise I did have a moment of panic that I should have been a doctor a few years ago but I hate when people vomit.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
Swallows have disappeared, bees are dying out because of pesticides that should have been banned long ago - it's a scandal.
There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
But for my faith in God, I should have been a raving maniac.
Even though the outcome wasn't the way it should have been, publicly I still feel in my heart I won the Sugar Ray Leonard fight.
My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt.
There are smart people on our side of the aisle who have known as early as I did who Obama was and should have been saying 'I hope this guy fails' right along with me. There should have been opposition to this guy all along.
Journalists should have been the first to tell people what Obamacare would mean to them. They are now the last to figure all of this out.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. I should have seen life like that and stay out of trouble, and don't do this and don't do that. But it's hard to live up to some people's expectations.
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.'
Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor.
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.
We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing again with national and global security matters.
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