“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: Could have, would have, and should have.” (Louis E. Boone)

I hope no one minds that I have made a gentle alteration to the above quotation: It orinally read, ‘Could have, might have, and should have’. I don’t know when Louis E. Boone said or wrote the words (actually I don’t know who Louis E. Boone is) but could have, would have and should have (or sometimes ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda‘) seems much more common to me as the thing that people sometimes say as a way of accepting or discarding regrets, mistakes and missed opportunities:

A few weeks ago I posted a lesson plan on this grammar point that involved a slideshow of book covers each with one of the word pairs in its title. Here is another one that uses quotations that were obtained from www.quotationspage.com. Quotations were found by running searches of either ‘could have‘, ‘should have‘ or ‘would have‘ on the site. In order to do this, the words should be typed into the search window at the top right of the page:

Here are some of the examples that were found:

• I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
  Jane Wagner, (and Lily Tomlin)

• The hardest work in the world is that which should have been done yesterday.
  Author Unknown

• It’s our fault. We should have given him better parts.
  Jack Warner, on hearing that Ronald Reagan had been elected governor of California

• I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
  Steve Jobs (1955 - ), Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005

• The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

• I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
  John W. Gardner (1912 - 2002)

• What profits a man if he keeps his eternal soul when he could have lived life to the full and been forgiven at the end of it all anyway?
  David Merritt, a.k.a. THE RED SHARK

• If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
  Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

• If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.
  George Gilder

• An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.
  Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)

• My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
  Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

There are a lot of quotations here but I want to demonstrate how powerful a resource quotations sites can be for finding examples of English to illustrate specific grammar structures or items of vocabulary to learners (in a previous posting, the same quotations site was used to find examples of the second conditional).

So how could these examples be used to teach the target language? Well in many cases, the sentences or paragraphs are quite long and it would be unpractical to ask students to reconstruct them in their entirety. Perhaps, then, a partial reconstruction might be the answer.

Lesson plan: coulda-shoulda-woulda-quotations.pdf