Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

We could have had it all...

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.

Tatiana...you and I had only one moment..." said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street. "I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

Caroline Waverly: Sometimes we hurt more for what might have been than for what is.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.

There is a phrase in French, which means 'to miss.' To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can't work for different reasons.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

He missed his imagined future.

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

Undeveloped, the whole thing,tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that's why we broke up.

In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.

It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry. I'm tired.'

She wonders what fool ever said that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all - she has never disagreed with something so much.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent