“What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.”

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”

Robert Bresson (1901–1999) French film director

“I'd rather be a 'could-be' if I cannot be an 'are' because a 'could-be' is a 'maybe' who is reaching for a star. I'd rather be a 'has-been' than a 'might-have-been' by far; for a 'might-have-been' has never been, but a 'has' was once an 'are.”

Milton Berle (1908–2002) American comedian and actor

“You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

“We could no more have a universal world market than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn't a capitalist was somehow able to to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What's more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

“The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.”

Deborah Smith (1955) writer of romance and women's fiction

“It's just the way things are. And you can't dwell on what might have been. You have to look at what is.”

Sophie Kinsella book Twenties Girl

“I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator

“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