Life & Wisdom Quote by Adelaide Anne Procter

A Victorian poet hands you a line that sounds like consolation and then quietly pulls the floorboards up. "We always may be what we might have been" is built on a sly grammatical dare: the past conditional ("might have been") usually seals a life into regret, but Procter yokes it to "may", a word of ongoing permission. The effect is to reopen a closed door without pretending the hallway behind it never happened. She doesn’t offer the easy fantasy of rewriting history; she offers something sharper: the possibility of becoming, now, the person your earlier self was capable of.

The subtext is moral as much as motivational. In a culture that loved fixed categories - class, gender, respectability - Procter smuggles in a radical elasticity. "Always" is the hinge: not "once", not "if you’re young enough", but persistently. It’s a rebuke to the Victorian appetite for permanent judgment, whether social or self-imposed. And "we" matters. This isn’t a lone hero narrative; it’s communal, almost pastoral, implying the speaker has watched people collapse into their worst stories about themselves and wants to interrupt that script.

Context deepens the pressure in the line. Procter wrote amid industrial change and hard social hierarchies; she was also a prominent woman poet in a literary scene that often treated women’s ambition as a moral problem. The sentence reads like a small act of resistance: against regret as identity, against society’s insistence that what you missed defines you, and against the seductive comfort of saying it’s too late.