"Might-have-been" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his highest ideals of womanhood, who is, in fact, a woman in ten thousand, to whom he has given all that he has to give of love and worship, the sudden wreck of all his hopes is no small calamity. And so I found it. Resign myself as I would to the bitter reality, the ghost of the might-have-been haunted me night and day, so that I spent my leisure wandering abstractedly about the streets, always trying to banish thought and never for an instant succeeding. A great unrest was upon me; and ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... all that Aguinaldo would have been a small edition of Porfirio Diaz, and that the Filipino republic-that-might-have-been would have been, very decidedly, 'a going concern,' although Aguinaldo probably would have been able to say with a degree of accuracy, as Diaz might have said in Mexico for so many years, 'The Republic? I am the Republic.'"—Blount, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... very hell of broken hopes, disappointed ambitions, shattered pride, and the hideous knowledge of the holocaust of human life he has deliberately sacrificed to these heathen gods of his. No poorest man on earth would change places with this man-that-might-have-been, for his time draws nigh ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... He was restless, and eager to explore the splendors of the house, that had been so nearly his inheritance, for it was not without a stubborn contest that the law had deprived him of what he still believed to be his rights. Nor had Crompton, in his eyes (as we have hinted), only the interest of Might-have-been; it had that of Might-be also. If not absolutely sanguine, he was certainly far from hopeless of fortune making him that great amends; at all events, while the opportunity was afforded him, which he well knew might be lost forever by his own imprudence, or through the caprice of another, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... DEARTH. A might-have-been? They are ghosts, Margaret. I daresay I 'might have been' a great swell of a painter, instead of just this uncommonly happy nobody. Or again, I might have been a worthless idle waster ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... knowledge what the whole thing meant that must seem, if they come to comprehend it now, a needless cruelty? If they—and you and I, in our turn—are to be nothing, mere items of the past lost in Oblivion, why not spare them the hideous revelation of the many, many years of might-have-been, when the same sun shone unmoved on each, even marked the hours for them alike, each unseen by the other, each beyond the sound of the other's speech, the touch of the other's hand? Why should either now, at the eleventh ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan |
