Should Have Quotes - Page 26

• A successful villain should have all these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting.

  Daniel Handler

  Kindness, Giving Up, Integrity

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• If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

  Nick Hornby

  Wanted, Mess, Ifs

  Nick Hornby (1996). “High Fidelity”, p.15, Penguin

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• She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Pain, Taken, Love Is

  Laurell K. Hamilton (2007). “The Harlequin: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel”, p.378, Penguin

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• That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

  Adrienne Rich

  Responsibility, Warrior, Thinking

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I should have known I am the rain. I am the land and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.

  John Steinbeck

  Rain, Land, Littles

  "To a God Unknown".

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• How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart.

  Charles Dickens

  Father, Heart, Garden

  Charles Dickens “Hard Times”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us--words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.

  David Levithan

  Life, Gone, Lines

  David Levithan (2014). “How They Met and Other Stories”, p.108, Egmont UK

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• I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Animal, Garden

  'Walden' (1854) 'Winter Visitors'

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• If you’re going to have childhood dreams you should have great parents who let you pursue them and express your creativity

  Randy Pausch

  Dream, Creativity, Childhood

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• The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

  Andre Malraux

  Stars, Powerful, Self

  "Man's Fate". Book by André Malraux, 1933.

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• And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief.

  William C. Bryant

  Sympathy, Grief, Mourning

  William Cullen Bryant, “The Death Of The Flowers”

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• I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations. And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

  Stephen King

  Dream, Memories, Children

  Stephen King (2008). “Duma Key: A Novel”, p.478, Simon and Schuster

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• Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Heart, Jewels

  C. S. Lewis (1995). “The last battle”

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• Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.

  Janet Evanovich

  Birthday, Lying, Thinking

  Janet Evanovich (1988). “Thanksgiving”, Loveswept

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• If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.

  Winston Churchill

  Struggle, Passion, Italian

  Speech in Rome, www.realclearpolitics.com. January 20, 1927.

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• …I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

  William Faulkner

  Lying, Thinking, Light

  William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.90, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

  George Orwell

  Art, Attitude, Political

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.228, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• my kingdom for a kiss upon your shoulder" lover you should have come over-

  Jeff Buckley

  Kissing, Kingdoms, Lovers

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• When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Health, Garden

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1166, Delphi Classics

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• If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

  Lori Lansens

  Liars, Coffee, Writing

  Lori Lansens (2006). “The Girls: A Novel”, p.104, Hachette UK

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• By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Morning, Book, Fall

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• They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.

  David Sedaris

  Believe, Mean, Underwear

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• For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

  Martin Amis

  Thinking, Boredom, Degradation

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• I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.

  A. J. Jacobs

  Book, Utah, Years

  A. J. Jacobs (2004). “The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• Directors are always changing things at the last minute. Actors will do a scene, and the director will say, ‘Okay, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of saying “What’s for dinner?” you say, “Wait a minute! Benzene is actually a hydrocarbon!” And say it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your character should have no arms.

  Dave Barry

  Character, Thinking, Perfect

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