Might Have Been Quotes

“We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity

“The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. The desire and ability to press on has and always will solve the problems of the human race and divide those who achieve from those who might have been.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are...”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“And everything I might have been, the different futures I might have taken, all my different lives and deaths that existed in their endless possibilities were extinguished in a single repetition of her three words. “You will hunt.”
When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of that future do you then cause to happen?
And all that might have been was long, long gone.”
― Patrick Ness, And the Ocean Was Our Sky

“It is a part of the river in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and faces, and things that might have been, but are not, confound them.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat