Source: The Book of Disquiet
“Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?”
José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature
Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos), quoted by José Saramago in The Stone Raft (1986), p. 9
Misattributed
Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale
Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 14 (p. 177)
Steve Perry (1947) American writer
Jo nodded. No surprise there. Sex had sold stuff ever since stuff had been around.
Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 3
“Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
"First We Take Manhattan" (1986)
I'm Your Man (1988)
Context: Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
Gustave Nadaud (1820–1893) songwriter
Stanza 2.
Carcassonne, (c. 1887; with translation by John Reuben Thompson)
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet
O fortunati miei dolci martiri!
S'impetrerò che giunto seno a seno,
L'anima mia nella tua bocca io spiri.
Canto II, stanza 35 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic
Laus Veneris.
Undated
“These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.”
Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer
Source: Listen to the Warm
Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet
Richard Zenith, Sonnets and Other Poems (2009)
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Enquanto quis Fortuna que tivesse
George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne (1666–1735) 1st Baron Lansdowne
She-Gallants; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Women", p. 886-97.
